


Day of the Navigator

by Umbreon_ly



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alien/Human Relationships, Astronaut AU, Dinosaur plushies, Horror, Human/Monster Romance, Interspecies Communication (wink), M/M, OiIwa more than IwaOi tbh, Predator and prey vibes, Smut, Space AU, Survivor's guilt and thoughts of suicide (briefly), Tentacles, dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24744235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbreon_ly/pseuds/Umbreon_ly
Summary: Astronaut Iwaizumi is forced to leave the crumbling Earth in a shuttle alone, hoping that the passenger-laden Travelers were able to leave first to escape the invaders and the planet's end. He flies in uncharted space to nowhere, for nothing.There are no Travelers out here. Only himself and his endurance against the infinite dark. And a pack of humanoid creatures that follow him. They and their smiling leader, never rebuffed by his defenses and weapons for long, endlessly circle the ship. The leader - brown-haired, brown-eyed, perhaps indestructible - watches him with awe and hunger. It salivates. Iwaizumi stares endlessly back.(OiIwa with monsterfucking and a little too much misery, but just hang in there, k)(also summarized in this helpful tumblr post)
Relationships: (KyouIwa and UshiIwa are not main focus), Iwaizumi Hajime/Kyoutani Kentarou, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, Iwaizumi Hajime/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 21
Kudos: 65
Collections: Haikyuu Horror Week





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a oneshot for IwaOi Horror Week 2019, goddamn me, lol. Like usual, I wrote too damn much, got way into the details and the world and the background, and now it's a multichap story. As of the time of posting, June 15 2020, Chap 2 has about 3.5k and will probably be around 10k before it's done. Might be a Chap 3 after that. 
> 
> I love OiIwa (thank u Eastern fandom for my life) but decided to mix it with a world-ending apocalypse for some reason, but also my fave niche plot contrivance of one character obsessively chasing or hunting another one with romantic and/or sexual implications. Even AO3 tags can't help me find stories like that lol, so I wrote my own. 
> 
> "Navigator" is just a fancy synonym for astronaut here.

Life was indoors for most. In a building on the ground or in a shuttle in the quiet of space.

The atmosphere was often pungent with decay except indoors, and in outdoor lanes where fresh air was manufactured. Indoors, he accomplished great things in sports and teamwork. These practices were worthless, but he cared about them. He cared, which made him able to endure.

His first girlfriend was sweet to him. He picked her because he didn’t know who else to pick, so he picked randomly. Random chance gave him a girl from a younger class who was soft and fussy, but smiled and was engaging. It felt nice. Holding her felt like holding a kitten, and holding her made him feel strong.

The day her father came home while they studied together, he was not strong. His girlfriend’s father congratulated them on their physics work, wholly unaware of the true thoughts of the boy in front of him. He watched her father’s wide chest and biceps and stubble and lion-like blonde hair and every breath that moved shadows on his collar. He shook the man’s hand and melted.

_‘Thanks so much for helping Hitoka with the terrarium lately, Hajime! I’m so glad my daughter found a guy like you. You know, we’ll be at the Forming Conference next week, too. They might like what you’ve got to contribute. Please come.’_

No point in stopping, denying. He had wondered before, but now he knew. “Please come,” he had said, his welcoming hand gripping Hajime’s shoulder. Please come. _‘Oh, Christ.’_

That night he kissed her goodbye and did not think of her after that. His parents were away and he was a cadet with his own spacious, elevated room besides, so no point in hiding the noise. He lay by himself in bed, gasping. He touched himself unabashedly to the sound in his head of his girlfriend’s father. His head was thrown back, his shirt pulled up to his throat so he might pretend the older man had frantically moved it himself, to see and touch more of him, which he acted out. He lay on his back, on his stomach, found pleasure almost everywhere. He felt like a kitten, being held.

He went to the Forming Conference the next week, thinking vaguely of the Yachi family and the best sprouts in his terrariums. He stood half-dazed in the crowd when a man came barreling through shrieking about engines. He knew. Everyone knew.

Before the man had been tackled, someone had started playing stitched-together videos on one of the big screens. The terraforming engines in Shanghai were on fire, all of them. Their newest Traveler in space above was half-dark. A reading from the Atmosphere Center showed lights at the edge of the Centauri system blinking out. Darkness coming closer, and the newest vehicle for off-Earth travel destroyed. Hitoka fled the room.

 _‘Oh Chriiiiiisst,’_ said Tendou the next day. Hajime frowned, angry instead of scared, because Ushijima wasn’t here to yank the mouthy redhead down. _‘My dad helped make the electric wiring on some of those. They were the best. Maybe I’ll end up taking a pill after all, whatcha think, Iwa-chan?’_

Hajime told him he didn’t know yet. Only Tendou talked about the pills so easily. Hajime steered the conversation to his progress in the plant lab, which at least Ohira appreciated. They played a game the next day. Shirabu worked with him and Ushijima both for once. They almost won.

 _‘Hajime, do you want to…turn the lights out?’_ No. But he did what Hitoka asked.

He did what he thought she might want. Things he’d read about just in case. Once her skirt was off, he mouthed and rumbled over the center of her panties, to make vibrations, to playfully tease. She shrieked before and after the panties were off, so she did like it. He liked her returning the favor. She kissed him on his collarbone and lay relaxed and warm against him and was happy to be with him. He liked her.

The next week Hitoka and her parents were gone for Shanghai to be involved with the rebuilding of the terraforming engines. He worried for her in a city so crowded, where all the most desperate were. No kiss goodbye, either. Just memories of her, and a picture he kept of her father.

He graduated. A planet far away broke into pieces. His parents were forlorn, like always. It didn’t feel like this when they were young, they said. There was more hope about the situation then.

 _‘Nobody burned the fucking shuttles or sabotaged each other’s Travelers back then,’_ his father cursed, with no energy at all. _‘Useless little cunts. Already gave up. And they want to drag everyone with them. They deserve to be stoned to death. Fuck ‘em all.’_

 _‘You want tea, Hajime?’_ and he told his mother he did. They sat at the table reading, staring, drinking tea together. He hugged them goodnight while they sat there.

Hajime went into space just after turning eighteen. Ushijima was with him, who had been at least ten times by then. Even in the rocket, perpendicular to the ground and watching the entire earth run away from them, he did not waver or show fear.

Hajime did feel fear, but he sought to emulate his captain. When his fear covered all else, he adhered to protocol. All cadets knew protocol like the touch of their own hands. True navigators knew it even better. Ushijima was a master of it; Hajime followed in his example. He monitored the rocket’s instruments as they ascended. He stopped gritting his teeth and settled his breath.

The ascension ended. Ushijima unstrapped him and he floated out of the seat, just like his classes told him he would.

 _‘Ready for your first spacewalk?’_ his old captain asked, extending a hand. Hajime said he was.

He strapped on the additional gear himself, the small air jets to control your motion and trajectory, but Ushijima assisted with his helmet.

Ushijima floated in the empty atmosphere with him on his first spacewalk. They looked down at the rounded earth, at thousands of miles of life. Beyond it, the infinite dark.

They set their hands on each other’s shoulders and laughed while they floated, surrounded by absolutely nothing. The captain of the mission took a picture while they smiled; Hajime asked him to send one to his mother.

Afterward, the captain floated next to them while the other navigators floated away. Ushijima’s expression bid Hajime to be quiet. Over the radio channel he thought he didn’t have access to, the captain told them what every person on the finite planet knew: there was not enough space or resources in all the Travelers for three billion people. Not even one.

The majority of space on a Traveler, even on the small shuttles, was for supplies and equipment and comforts. Some Travelers and shuttles held resources only and were meant to follow the populated ones. But cadets and astronauts, necessary to run them, had a seat guaranteed for themselves and two others.

Hajime’s expression on the descent back to earth was dark-eyed and far away, just like Ushijima’s. He wondered how long his old friend had known. How he could possibly speak to anyone on the ground who expected a seat, to civilians with no astronaut ties. How he would decide how to feel about it. It was only by chance he became a cadet in the first place. Only by chance had the faraway enemies spotted Earth thirty years before and changed their course to head towards it. By chance, they might all die anyway.

 _‘I’m taking my dad with me,’_ Ushijima said. Outside there was heat blazing around all the windows as they entered the atmosphere once more. It painted his still face with flickering fire. _‘And he’ll probably want to take my mother. So she’ll have to be my second.’_

They had known each other since the high school cadet academy started. It was four long years that Ushijima’s family matters remained in the dark. Iwaizumi decided to reach out again and ask about his mother, about why he pulled so far away from her. The question made Ushijima quiet. And he quietly refused to answer.

‘ _Iwaizumi, if you haven’t picked who you’re taking yet, don’t worry over it. There’s plenty of time left,’_ he said instead. Hajime spoke his true feelings to him and said that he knew he would not be taking his parents. Ushijima held his eyes. 

Once they were on the ground they inhaled the warm summer air of the earth. They felt the breeze drying their sweat as they looked at each other. Wakatoshi embraced him.

Hajime pressed his face into that shoulder for as long as he dared. When he had to pull away, they still walked close to each other, shoulders bumping softly. They walked next to each other for a bit, before the captain was taken away on urgent matters and Hajime had to watch him leave. 

The day after that landing, four planets were smothered in a black matter and then broken apart into melting rock. Something moved in outer space in a straight line towards them, as it had been for almost thirty years. It came from beyond Centauri. But from that day forward, it advanced faster than light. The earth was finite. Humanity shrieked for its life.

Above many nations’ airspace floated their Travelers: ships built in space over a decade or more that would last many decades. Far below on the ground were shuttles, which carried either tiny populations or merely ferried passengers on short trips from the ground to the Travelers in space. Whatever was coming towards Earth wouldn’t arrive for almost three years, but already the populace was on the move to claim their seats or to relocate prematurely.

Meanwhile, the cadets and astronauts worked in a never-ending stream to build engines, add resources to the Travelers and shuttles, grow flora and fauna and technology, grow ways to outwit death. Because it truly was death. There were no weapons large enough to guarantee the enemy’s destruction. There was no defense against whatever caused the demise of other faraway planets.

As the coming of the end marched closer, the earth’s fragile calm began to shiver, then spasm. The armored New York island closed its walls. South Africa enacted immediate martial law and neighbors followed within weeks. An astronaut in Chile was mauled to death, then another, then another, then cadets and astronauts cloistered themselves where desperate civilians could not destroy them. Hajime cloistered himself around his parents, who were no longer forlorn.

 _‘I love you, I love you,’_ his mother said. She kissed his cheeks and his tear-filled eyes. It was difficult not to crush her. _‘My beautiful strong son. You’re so wise and good. You got all my good parts and none of my bad, you know.’_

His father embraced him till he felt small. Till he shrank into him. He sobbed as he did when he was a child and begged them not to leave. _‘I want you to live,’_ his father said into his hair, while his mother held him from behind. _‘I want you to leave this shithole place and find somewhere you deserve to be. Don’t you give up. Don’t start to sink, okay? Not you. Not you.’_

They made him stay inside the astronaut’s lodging building when they drove away. His parents drove away in a taxi cab to somewhere nearby, perhaps even somewhere on the base, where people could take the pill. They drove away out of his life and out of their own.

He sobbed alone. He slept for fourteen hours and then for none. He spent days at the gym speaking to no one, lost in easy, mindless action. He sat with in a library where there were armed guards and pretended to read. He worked under Ushijima’s supervision and watchful eye when he thought he could bear the loneliness no longer. And when he truly could not bear it, he slammed his head into a desk. He thrashed like a ghoul, hurting and moaning pain from his hurt, and when he was finished and had left blood on the desk and on his face and nose, the guards nearby respectfully looked away.

He graduated again. He was an astronaut now, a _navigator_ , no longer a cadet in any kind of schooling. Somehow, Tendou was at the ceremony and waved to him. Hajime smiled back at him from the stage in his resplendent, worthless uniform.

For navigators in that time, life was a rotation of going into space and coming back in a routine cycle. They worked for four weeks at a time on preparing the Traveler _Canto. Canto_ housed some of his own plants and algae in its many arbor grounds. Herbivores on board ate them and men breathed the oxygen they made. They would help generate eternal oxygen for this journey, if need be.

In time, as urban centers began to burn and the Travelers grew bloated, he was able to smile more often than not. Each day, his head was bent to tasks and work and the feel of his own sweat.

When he felt he was being strangled, he went to an arbor ground on board, or a garden on the Earth and felt his sprouts in his hands. Once, he watched a tiny stripe of sweat from his palm be left on the leaf of a tomato plant he had grown himself.

He was sweating at an earthbound gym once when a stranger asked him to spot for him. The stranger was a cadet, falsely blond and legitimately aggressive. Hajime, undaunted, accepted him. He was Kyoutani, a mechanic. He was forever irritated that a dislocated shoulder had kept him out of a game where he might have otherwise have faced Hajime on a volleyball court some years ago. Often he would challenge Hajime to tests of athleticism. Often he would lose. 

One day when there was over a year left, and they were walking a dog in the sunlight, Hajime asked him how he was feeling. To say aloud anything that felt like it was poisoning him. He would not tell. He knew the feeling of poison.

Kyoutani walked close enough to brush their bare shoulders together. _‘I think about taking the pill sometimes. Just go to bed. Just go to bed and get the hell out of here for good.’_

Hajime asked him why.

_‘Because I’m never not gonna feel like a cowardly piece of shit. Everything that was ever worth anything is over. Every one of us...running away. To fucking what? Why?’_

They were running towards their best chance, Hajime said to Kyoutani. It didn’t have to make them feel good or proud. Just alive, and able. Just the choice to keep having choice. Just because I want to, Kyoutani. 

They passed under a tree that painted them with shadows. Then they were back in the sun together, and warm. 

_‘It’s Ken.’_

They took his bull terrier back home and went to a quiet sector of the gym. Ab workouts, sit-ups, a few lifts, always ignoring the red countdown clock on every wall. Kyoutani instead watched Hajime’s movements as he held the navigator’s feet down for sit-ups. He watched him flop back down onto the mat, panting. He leaned forward between his legs till their faces were parallel to each other.

The intimacy suffused them both at once. Kyoutani had long felt it. Hajime was beautiful and strong and would survive Earth with him, he felt it to be true. He must make it true. Hajime’s eyes were green, and welcoming, so he made to take Hajime with him.

He set his arms on either side of the navigator’s head; he felt those strong hands pressing down on his shoulders. They met at a middle distance in a soft first kiss. Hajime licked at the young blonde’s lips; they parted in a gasp of wonder.

What nerves held him back before evaporated then. Kyoutani dropped his torso down to grind their bodies together. He kissed again with an open mouth this time, wanting Hajime’s tongue. Immediately it was gifted to him. He moaned into that open mouth with gratitude. Meanwhile hands were drifting lazily up his shirt, exploring, then drifting the opposite direction. Kyoutani’s mouth captured Hajime’s own again and again, suckled at his lower lip, while the navigator’s hands gripped his ass and pulled him even closer.

He asked if this was all right, but Kyoutani’s hands were busy trying to force Hajime’s shirt off, or at least up to his collar and out of the way. Like a mad dog, he growled back, ‘ _Mother fuck, yes, it’s all right.’_

At last he could freely explore this body that he admired. The skin, movement from his breath, the firmness of these muscles made him sigh with delight. Finally, finally. The touch was as wonderful as it he imagined it to be. Hajime did not squirm or whimper from the attention, but lie back in repose for the other to touch at his pleasure. 

_‘Hajime, I’ve—thought about this. If that ain’t obvious.’_

It was amusing, flattering. It made him break eye contact just long enough to chuckle, almost to blush. It flattered Kyoutani, too, by making him believe he’d pierced the strong and unflappable veil at last. He invited his mentor’s hands back onto the curve of his ass where they’d been before. He followed his mentor’s invitation to rut against his delicious body like he wanted to.

Kyoutani got up onto his elbows just once, to have a better look at Hajime’s face, which was still too content and soft for his liking. He shoved the pleased navigator’s thighs apart with his own and yanked crudely at the hips of both their shorts. There was one flash of nervousness at pulling his own cock out of his pants, but then it was gone, and so was Hajime’s casual posture.

He gritted his teeth when Kyoutani dragged it and pumped it right alongside his own. The tease of it pressing along his own through the cotton material of his shorts made his hips jerk. It made Kyoutani smirk.

Hajime was supporting himself on his elbows and panting, fingers curling up as his own pleasure languidly grew. Kyoutani separated from him briefly. He sat up higher to see him from a new angle, one he had imagined many times before. He indulged in that familiar fantasy of taking himself in hand and pleasuring himself while Hajime watched, but this time it was real, and Hajime did watch.

The motion was asking for a reciprocal one. Hajime obliged; he could only stand a handful of seconds before his own hardness demanded action. He pulled his own shorts down further under Kyoutani’s intense watch. The blond’s animal grunting turned to a groan as he watched that cock pull free from under the red waistband. It was thicker than his own and darker. He watched Hajime’s hands on it, then claimed it with his own hand.

_‘Let me do it. So I can look at you. Just lemme look at you.’_

The response was a nod instead of a word. Kyoutani’s hands were paler than his and far too sweaty. But his grip was sure as Hajime’s own hand, as wanting as could be. He curved around the balls tenderly and then up all the way to the dribbling head, and then grabbed their lengths together. With his palms wet, he pumped along them both. His knuckles brushed Hajime’s pelvis with each movement, positioning their shafts away from himself and towards the flat of Hajime’s belly, because _Christ_ he wanted to cum on him.

Fighting to last, Kyoutani gasped aloud, _‘You better be on my Traveler when we go.’_ The fluorescent lighting flickered above them once, twice, glimmering on their muscles and smears of sweat. ‘ _Or take a shuttle to mine. Once we…take off. Shit—shit! Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi…please come to mine, please.’_ Please come.

 _Oh Christ_ , Hajime fell suddenly closer to the sweet edge with a helpless gasp, and another and another, till each breath was a little whine.

Ken watched his eyes close and his brows rise up and pinch together, losing his fight to last, too. Hajime’s head curled so far back it exposed his throat. It made him lose control of his voice. Ken almost faltered when he saw Hajime smiling, too. That amount of sweetness being gifted to him was unbearable. His own pleasure was about to peak.

He felt Hajime’s pleasure at being here, at being with him, he felt his hands gripping his thigh because he wanted him to stay close and to know he wanted to be here. It was worth it all, to be here.

The fluorescent lights blinked again like the transformers were going out. Then the countdown clock did the same. Kyoutani noticed both but refused to internalize it or stop his motions. Not now with his mentor finally lying prone in his shadow and shuddering from his hand on his cock. One person ran by the threshold that led to the rest of the gym. Kyoutani wouldn’t stop.

Hajime swore and then couldn’t speak. His gasps were now moans that he couldn’t tame. Kyoutani nearly salivated. 

Their phones went off in rhythmic, low-toned beeping like some underground alarm. Both of them stopped. Cadets and astronauts of all ranks knew the language. They heard _wormhole over Mars—departure—thi—shuttles immediately to—_

Their bodies stiffened up, went hard and uncomfortable pushing against each other. Then they were flaccid. _–not a drill. Not a drill. Flight to Travelers is immediate. This is a not a drill._

What pleasure was left on Earth abandoned them. They searched each other’s eyes and neither knew what they saw.

They scrambled up off the floor, frantically rearranged their sweaty and lightly stained athletic wear, and fled together. They approached the flight line where shuttles the size of hospitals took up miles upon miles of runway. There were multiple civilian families camped out near the chain link fence as always, but many more would arrive.

A superior already wearing a flight suit approached the men and commanded them to man the shuttles. The protocol of a trained navigator was woven into them both. Kyoutani and Iwaizumi went to their duties without looking back at each other.

Civilians from outside the base came to board; astronauts and some cadets were there to seat them and fly them up to a Traveler. Hajime grabbed luggage from strangers and dragged it to the storage belts. When they brought too-large containers he threw them on the runway. Clothes and plastic and heirlooms of life all became litter on the tarmac.

He strapped strangers into the shuttle seats to prepare them for spaceflight, counted and secured supplies on the shuttle in their dozens and hundreds—oxygen and water filters, food storage, livestock pens, wirings, printers, terraforming cogs, pharmaceuticals—and endless, endless people.

For fourteen hours he ran, sorted, pushed, shoved, shouted, sweated. He piloted Shuttle 4 on half of its trips. Passengers who had never been to space saw the _Canto_ for the first time. For most, their approach to it would be the only time they would ever see their Traveler in its entirety. The _Canto_ was twenty miles long, below average compared to all Travelers worldwide. It was rectangular, armed, stocked, and finally reaching capacity. Only after docking and letting off the sixth passenger load did he and the copilot receive further news.

There lay a hole in space next to Mars, with predictions that another would open even closer to the Earth. Lengthy, loud signals emanated from it. Men had dared to respond to it but were ignored. It wasn’t communication or any entreaty to respond, but hostility, war cries, they said. They’re coming to eat us.

When he boarded the next passenger load onto Shuttle 4, news from the radio said that they had made contact. Earth was invaded. Today. Iwaizumi gritted his teeth and endured. He did what a navigator must, making the way to safety no matter what.

Iwaizumi grabbed two children that were of no relation to each other and forced them into one adult seat.

The invaders came through the wormhole not on a ship or transport of any kind but in a cloud of many tight-knit beings, a school of fish that consumed metal and flesh without discrimination.

Iwaizumi sprinted down the flight line and had to pilot Shuttle 9 twice because its pilot chair was abandoned and the passengers were screaming to go.

The beings were on the mainland and moving into the sea. Seawater became not only undrinkable, but untouchable. 

Iwaizumi found a crying grey-haired woman who begged to sit next to her adult daughter, who had fled their home without her. He shoved her into an open seat without speaking to her.

The Atmosphere Center did not hide the news that there was a second wormhole as close as the moon. It bled toxic radiation. It sang nauseating cries. 

Humanity shrieked for its life.

He was a man of endurance. He was honed and trained for space travel and engineering, for endurance beyond the infinite dark. But he was nothing. Everything he had ever been was nothing now. Everything that mattered to the future of human life was aboard the Travelers, or held tight in his hammering heart.

Before dawn, after twenty-eight hours awake, he approached Misaki from the agriculture labs to speak for perhaps the third time in their lives. He meant to ask her about livestock, about the population count of cows aboard the _Canto_ and what were the qualifications needed to switch career fields to the agriculture side so he and Ushijima could be dairy farmers together, because he was not in his right mind by then.

A man in even more dire straits than he got to her first. The older navigator nearly bashed his chest into hers as he confronted her and demanded to know why we weren’t all boarding a Traveler right now, don’t you fucking know, you have to know. Are you sleeping with some limp cock who’ll let you on earlier than us? Cause he likes your tiny tits and your little boy body, are you getting on early _say something already you stupid spineless fucking cunt!_

Misaki started to cry. She told the nearby astronauts to stay by the shuttles if they wanted to live. Sobbing and not speaking, she unlocked the fence gate and let the next rush through, leaving them without another word.

Kuroo appeared on the edge of the crush of people, his hair hanging in his face even more limply than usual. He panted and struggled up the shuttle’s boarding catwalk but did not stop. He endured till he was near the crowded passenger threshold of Shuttle 4 where Iwaizumi waited to receive him. He clapped a hand on the scientist’s shoulder and yanked him forward so he was standing closer. 

He asked Kuroo for news of the things that had landed on Earth.

_‘There’s a third wormhole now. S’like all intelligent life is coming to hunt us down. The ones that landed in China’ll be here by tomorrow morning.’_

Oh, Christ. Tomorrow. The last day on Earth. Or was today the last day on Earth?

_‘No, today. Today is it for us, Iwaizumi.’_

He told Kuroo to not give in to his fear. Endure. We will make it. Look at me, we’ll make it. I swear to you.

They both grabbed at each other’s shoulders, then faces. They felt each other’s sweat on their palms. They were reflected but solid in each other’s eyes.

_‘Hope to see you once we’re all up there and flying, Iwaizumi.’_

Iwaizumi told him the same—once we’re flying—

Iwaizumi was flying.

He was flying alone.

Shuttle 4 was empty of passengers. He had no copilot. And in his draining reserve of consciousness, he could not remember why.

Below was some part of Hokkaido, but the Japanese Traveler _Kitan_ was not there. It was nowhere in nearby airspace. No Travelers or shuttles were nearby at all. The closest one was Russian, three hundred miles away, announcing its early departure.

An American traveler followed while a second one stayed. There came a bloom of radiation and incredible heat: leagues and leagues away, it had fired upon some enemy and the cloud of flame reached the Sea of Japan. Iwaizumi was blinded.

With muscle memory, he coded a flightpath to _Canto,_ his new home. The console sounded a rejection noise: _Canto_ was refusing all boardings.

A huge swath of Japan was silent and communicated nothing. His base now communicated nothing, even though he could hear the passengers’ cries in his head, like they had been in his radio or standing with their mouths to his ears. While he had let off his final load of passengers to _Canto,_ he had somehow still heard the waiting ones on the ground saying _Please come, oh please. Baby, the shuttle’s coming back, don’t worry, baby. We’ll be able to get on…oh navigator, please come._

Iwaizumi’s hands clasped over his eyes.

_Please come, navigator._

But he was alone.

He shouted so quickly and hoarsely that it shredded at his throat. He left the pilot’s chair and fell, then crawled to the metal wall, the only possible balm, and crashed his head into it. Once, twice, some more. Till there were no thoughts and no voices and he stopped crying. Till the pain covered up all other things.

Protocol came back before his thinking mind did. It coded the coordinates of flight path in his empty head: get to a Traveler, from which he could be of use. 

Something knocked against the flight deck’s window. It was a glimmering black shape which retreated from the window and ducked around it to head for the ground far below. After it, a second one crashed directly onto the window like a bug against a windshield. Iwaizumi tried to look at it, but gagged as soon as he did.

It was repulsive and strange to look at. It was made up of luminescent green-black layers that were both inside the flight deck and outside against the window like some optical illusion. The shape was recognizably humanoid, with a torso and four limbs in recognizable places. It looked like it existed in multiple dimensions, he reasoned, half-delirious, but the reasoning was an afterthought, after he’d dry-heaved against his forearm. With the other arm, he coded an initiation for weapons to deploy and scrape the thing off his windshield.

Hammers the size of a human body were deployed from an opened grate at the edge of the huge window. The creature didn’t see either of them coming; they met in the middle of the window and crushed the thing’s torso to the width of an arm. It was pulverized into meat.

Iwaizumi heard its animal scream, saw pointed parts of its reddish innards poking out. He panted with violent desire at the sight. It deserved a greater punishment than that for coming here.

He hammered its ruined abdomen a second time. He roared. Through the glass he called: Out of my way you ugly piece of _shit!_

Primal certainty told him he must hit it until it breaks, and he did. The weapons ramped up to such speeds that they generated heat. A drill joined the fray, coming from up out of sight of his window. He directed its angle at the back of the creature’s skull. He saw the drill fall, pierce, hit home. Its blood sprayed all around, glittering black.

Its squeal keened up to an unbearable pitch. Then it suddenly tore free of everything. It fled out of sight, off to easier prey. But Iwaizumi remained prey: he was isolated from any herd or habitat and nearer to death than ever before. He reached for his radio and tried to join up somewhere.

He asked for _Canto_ and was ignored. He asked and then shouted. He shouted for anyone on the airwaves to come to him. He would protect them, he would take them into his own ship, he would give any help or take any. But nobody came.

Across all airwaves there was nothing but an occasional recording: _Do not approach Travelers. Do not approach shuttles. No boarding. Boarding vessels will be left behind—_

His patience ran thin and disappeared and became a threatening scream instead. He demanded and shouted as though he were a minister of Atmosphere and not an astronaut cog.

Heedless, the recording continued: _‘Exodus Routes 4 through 7 and Route 1 are compromised. Each Traveler to its own journey. Loss of life too great. Cannot stay. Each Traveler to its own journey, stop, don’t lock it, please OPEN THE DOOR!’_

The recording stopped there and reset. He tried others. The few that listened now shut him out.

No, please listen, please, I’m over Kyoto—

No, the nearest shuttle shut off its own radio and a second one fled from him.

No, he wished, but his wishes were nothing to Travelers loaded with lives. They were moving in different directions. They were moving into new wormholes where no invaders had spilled from yet. They were taking chances in every direction while he sped nowhere over the curve of the Earth.

No, take me with you.

No, don’t leave me alone.

No, please—

No answer.

Human contact ended.

Canto Shuttle 4’s flight path hugged the Earth in terror, its pilot holding tight to his self-control. As there was no hope or help in the air, he turned planetside and began scouring the surface for other people. He hovered near a single individual near a hillside, but they fled into a building. He found a family at the edge of huge towers of white fire, and they were consumed. West of his flightpath there was a new hole in space above the ocean, stretching nearly as far as his vision could take in. Seawater drained into it, pulling ocean water into an unknown waterfall.

He flew on and his breath was stolen away. Ahead was a Traveler fifty times his size, growing larger each second as he neared. It was rushing and roaring and falling—spiriting straight down in the air to the ground far below. Its engines were failing or its pilots mad. Strange beings with undulating, exposed organs set their puckered mouths over the ship’s many windows. They were seeking the flesh of the visible prey inside.

The Traveler fell, fell, took his life with it.

 _Don’t go,_ Iwaizumi begged in his mind. _Don’t fall. Don’t—_ But his own words collapsed and fell. He sobbed as he saw the many predators coming to attach themselves to the ship. Some were burned away by the great fire. When it hit the ground, the fire would eat a city.

The Traveler’s dying roar was so great he couldn’t hear the long-tailed beasts all around it. They were only viscera, only mindless meat like him. They _wanted_ this ship to fall and expose its belly and its meat. It meant nothing to them. Human life was as nothing. The Traveler, it was a creation of twenty years or more. It was nothing.

One of the beings pushed through one of the Traveler’s windows. Air and human possessions went spilling out into the air. He could not hear the cries from within.

Iwaizumi flew towards the great vessel with his tears and his own roar. 

How fucking dare you, the astronaut thought, and without thought or compassion began to destroy the intelligent life.

Some he burned with reverse thrusters or flame jets. One, he tore in two with a drill, innards spilling messily over the wide window of his flight deck. Others he hammered till their broken skulls and bones slopped out of their heads. He killed.

He killed them from the front seat of the flight deck till enough of the massive pack noticed him. Then they turned on him. Iwaizumi engaged a final weapon that blasted a great many of them with electricity. The revolting animal minds were fried to cooked meat as they deserved. But when numerous others took the place of the fallen, when their suckers and arms covered his entire window, he fled. The Traveler continued to fall.

The navigator fled, pursued by a hundred monsters.

He fled his mother, Earth, whose blue beauty was already changing. The shuttle’s window was smeared with gore, but through it he saw a surface world in its death throes. Clouds of swirling ash-grey like supercell storms were blighting the planet’s surface and spreading miasma in the air. Technology and weaponry had become only spots of fire and garbage. From this far away, there were no countries, only land and scars. 

Beyond Earth and its death throes there was nothing. One man and the infinite dark. He wanted to flee.

It ran against protocol, and against his own soul, to flee alone. All his life he was one of many, working with many, surrounded by many. He was not meant to be alone. But a cloud of many-armed predators was coming.

He could sink into it, blazing and ripping until death. But his father had told him not to.

Iwaizumi fled into deep space alone. There were no Travelers out here.

-

The shuttle was empty.

The shuttle was empty but for him. Supplies for five hundred for months, or him for years. It would be him alone in the infinite dark now, if no Traveler showed up to take him in or let him follow. But none ever would.

 _Alone,_ yes, he had thought once, and then stood up to have thoughts elsewhere on the ship.

Elsewhere he found a way to not be alone: in the passenger bay were many items dropped from pockets, hands and frantic passengers when he’d made his drop-offs on _Canto._ There were books, photographs, toys, supplies. For now he gathered the toys.

Among that pile was a plush dinosaur. Probably a tyrannosaurus. It was lovingly rendered and with pointed little carnivore teeth and lifelike green coloring and shadows. Holding it made him feel young. It made him feel like it was time to play outside, a pleasure he hadn’t known for a long time. He walked around with it. He hoped he might find a stowaway to give it to. But there was nothing.

He found a blanket, then two, then a pillow. He lay in the confining space between two treadmills in the gym room and covered himself. He curled into a ball around his dinosaur so that its plush head and back nuzzled his cheek. For hours he shivered and slept.

Time passed.

Debris passed.

Emptiness passed.

Hajime sobbed.

Broken rocks passed.

Dead planets passed.

Time passed.

Nothing passed.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

-

Protocol and training made a navigator. They moved his muscles and mind when nothing else was there to hold him. They made him stand up when he was alone. They made Iwaizumi function on the shuttle. They and his pet tyrannosaurus did. Iwaizumi strapped the tyrannosaurus plush to his belt each morning and carried him around. His name was Tory the T-rex.

Shuttle 4 had many rooms he could carry Tory into: a large arbor room with pleasant gardens and vegetables growing, a savory-smelling growery for artificial meat, a cozy library, a bright and inviting gym. No passenger had ever touched any of them before, so he filled them with touch.

In each room he placed residents from his treasure pile: a plastic frog, a green superhero figurine, a cat with light-up eyes. The residents were his coworkers. He saluted them and gave progress reports. And there was much to report on.

He went to Hitoka the cat captain, flicked her switch so that her eyes were lit up, and reported the day. Coordinates of asteroids and planets within immediate view. Trace elements in the atmosphere that day. Observations of far-off stars and their temperatures. A daily lack of Travelers or shuttles. Supply inventories. His own body composition statuses as he exercised and fed himself nutritious meals. Hitoka liked that part best.

He spoke slowly for her, so she would not be overwhelmed. But she was bright and attentive back to him. She said he’d done an excellent job and dismissed him. She bid him goodnight, and he to her.

He read books during break hours, went to bed on schedule. He shaved and kept his jaw professionally bare. He gave himself innumerable haircuts. He kept waking up for each new day.

One day after his supply report to the plastic dog admiral in the growery, the routine was jostled. He had been crouched on his knees tending spinach plants for less than a minute when the stem bowed. All stems bowed, just a little, as a vibration rang through the hull. At the base of his spine the navigator felt a poisonous fear.

Once the vibration ceased, he rose. He jogged, then sprinted. He tore up the nearby metal staircase and past an airlock and down the hall to the flight deck, which looked straight ahead into space.

There was a body on the windshield. The poison turned to stone.

He both recognized and recoiled, because it was a man.

 _Captain,_ he thought for a moment, before revulsion stopped his breath in his throat. It was not his captain.

It was not a man, even though he had instinctively recognized it as one. Even though it was shaped like one. He stood with mouth agape there in the threshold, trying to comprehend it

It was a humanshaped thing, or it was humanshaped sometimes—every few times he blinked, there were four limbs sticking out of a torso and a man’s face atop it. And in between those blinks, he nearly saw through its skin to the stars far beyond. And whether he blinked or not, there were more limbs behind and around the humanlike ones: long arms or tentacles, waving.

No man, but an imposter of one. A predator of one. It was the one that struck his window in the sky over Hokkaido. But its body had grown anew like a regenerating worm. The waist was no longer hideously crushed. There was no hole in the side of its skull from the drill. It was whole again, somehow. It had come after him somehow, millions of miles from the last place it saw him.

 _Once we’re flying—I’ll see you—_ said Kuroo, who was dead. _I—will—see—you._

It had a mouth like a person, even hair. It had a grin like Kuroo used to have.

Without words, its grin said: _I see you._

The human eyes were familiar, then sickening. Repulsive. Iwaizumi’s clinging desire to see other human beings writhed like an invasive worm in his chest. And with a choking sound, it came out as though exorcised, supernaturally moved. He could not abide seeing the shape of a human in this being. It was wrong. It was not deserved. It must die.

The revulsion made him sprint to the console, halving the distance between himself and the creature. He drew up weapons as he’d done the first time, millions of miles from here. It watched him click and fumble with unblinking eyes.

Then a drill and hammer deployed, smaller ones than before. The new hammer struck its shoulder and made it collapse inward as though the bones within had melted. The drill speared its abdomen, but the creature tore free seconds later.

Quick as a dolphin underwater, it whirled backward from the window, out of the short-range weapons’ reach.

The eyes were visible even from that distance. Iwaizumi met the glare, panting and wide-eyed. The creature’s eyes had long depths, like they were a cave system extending far beyond the back of their owner’s skull. Perhaps if one of the drills pierced those eyes, they would never push through the other side of the skull.

Its mouth opened in the shape of a roar that could not be heard. The stripes on its abdomen briefly glowed green. Then it flitted away over the north hull and behind him into open space. Infrared readings displayed its fleeing form, and eventually did not display it at all. The navigator was alone again.

He collapsed forward onto the console, feeling like a disembodied spectator to his own body. In a dreamlike way, his head feel forward till it rested on metal and the console buttons glowed from the limp press of his forehead. They were uncomfortable to lean on. They were nothing like the shoulder of a friend, which he had last felt over a year ago ago. They were not a man or a parent or even a comforting toy. They hurt. 

It made him forget the protocol momentarily. It made it plausible for one to even forget it permanently and purposefully. It hurt so much he could drown if he wanted.

The dog admiral and the cat captain were not alive. They would sit on their little fucking tables and chairs that he placed them on and would continue to do so if he was dead.

It was a mighty thought, that he could not be stopped if he wanted to proceed. How invigorating that was. To be unstoppable. He used to feel that way in school, as a cadet. Those feelings grew especially when he walked in Ushijima’s wake. Under bright fieldhouse lights. And on the tarmac, even, when the hours dragged on and he refused to stop moving, because he had to endure. In that moment and that memory, he breathed air of the earth. 

The feeling was a brand in him. Present and true, even now. He could reach back to Earth and those years and touch the outline of what it had felt like to be unstoppably strong.

He was not defeated yet. His mind held him up yet.

But he did code a speed increase on the console, to get the hell out of here, to flee, like a fucking coward piloting an empty shuttle alone.

-

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

I’m sorry, Dad. I love you.

There was a pill on the table ready for him today. It followed him today. He endured each day by looking at it and remembering what it felt like in his hand.

It was by his bed today, closer than before.

-

_Today is it for us, Iwaizumi._

Today was the only day Iwaizumi Hajime had ever had.

The day’s work, the day’s input, the day’s sweat and output for the benefit of all. On Shuttle 4 and its course to fucking nowhere, there was only ever today’s business to attend to. The past was burned and gone. There was no future. And no one else to care. Each day, he endured.

Today, he sat in the corner of the arbor room where he could look on the tallest oak tree in the center of the room. He could see at either side of him the rows of flowers that were the color of spring. He watched them and their colors. He breathed their natural air. He listened to passengers in his mind.

There were real passengers whom he’d shuttled from the flight line to _Canto_ and watched get off his shuttle himself. Then there were those strangers on the tarmac who had waited their turn to become passengers next. The ones he had never met. Their lives were in suitcases like his life was in his head. Now spilled onto the tarmac.

They said: _Please come._

No protocol held him this time. Nothing was here to hold him.

_Baby the shuttle’s coming, don’t worry baby._

He never came.

_We’ll be able to go…oh, navigator, please come._

He was flying.

 _You’ve got plenty of time,_ Ushijima had once said to reassure him. Ushijima took him to the cold of space for the first time and led him till he could walk. Ushijima told him what must be and took action before others must. He followed that example so much that it made him able to refuse death every day.

Today, which was all days for all time, he followed his captain’s order, so strong and righteous and beautiful was he. 

Ushijima, can I see you today? Please?

…

Did you make it onto a Traveler? Are you okay? I’d cut my fucking hand off if I could see that you were okay.

…

His hands were invaluable when he was a student and a cadet. He was a volleyball player back when there were sports teams in the cadet schools. He struck hard, but Ushijima struck like thunder. And they never faltered.

The sweat keeping his jersey to his skin and the hard press of his muscles as he jumped felt like bliss.

 _Christ, we’re on_ fire! Tendou exclaimed, slapping them both on the back. 

When a tie threatened them and Goshiki and Shirabu were wavering, Iwaizumi took the lead himself to show them was must be done, as his captain had taught him was right. When the timeout was called, he asked for their trust. Depend on me, fall back to me. I’ll take us to victory. Ushijima, are you with me?

_Yes._

The lost vessel of the _Canto_ was wholly dark now but for the light of Iwaizumi’s eyes, thick with tears. He turned around in the dark of space and the dark of that room, trying to see.

Ushijima was there, immaculate.

Hajime was there, alone.

The flight suit was white and pristine. The face above it was honest and stern.

_Today is it for us, Iwaizumi._

What day was today? How long had he been in flight, alone, the only known human left?

Ushijima, are you alive? Are you okay?

You’re _not okay,_ he said back at him. _Iwaizumi. It’s useless to feel this way. Get up off the floor._

…No, he decided to say. He decided to ignore the man’s voice and speak aloud his thoughts. He gave Ushijima the naked truth: he longed to take the pill sometimes. Just go to bed. Just go to bed and get the hell out of here for good.

Ushijima asked him why.

Because I’m never not gonna feel like a cowardly piece of shit. Everything that was ever worth anything is over. My life is over. So many people’s lives are over. Because of me. Because I—fucking—

_Yes, I know what you did._

I—just—snapped, for a second, I just…I didn’t care anymore. I don’t know why. I swear on my mother’s grave I don’t know why.

_You don’t know why you stole the shuttle?_

_…_

_Like a thief. A degenerate traitor._

_…_

_What would Kyoutani think of you? He admired you so much. When was the last time you even thought about him?_

_…_

_What have you thought about the last load of passengers who were waiting for you to come back for your next trip?_

_Are you a murderer?_

Are you a murderer?

ARE YOU?

Iwaizumi screwed his eyes shut and wailed.

Every moment of endurance was as nothing compared to his final deed on Earth. Every time he was ever a _good man_ was erased and undone. All his sweat and work was nothing to anyone now that they were dead and eaten and broken. Hitoka was a fool to love him, Ushijima was a fool to ever believe in him. Iwaizumi wailed _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry._

He was imprisoned in a vacuum for all time; he deserved this Nothing.

Ushijima said his name in a strong, sure baritone that was louder than his screams. It made the despair stop cutting him. In desperation he gasped Wakatoshi’s name aloud and reached for him, wanting to touch him. He stumbled forward in the dark till his palms hit the wall. The steel panel echoed from the impact. Then it was quiet.

 _Iwaizumi. They died waiting for you. And they died when you were in spaceflight. You could not have gotten to them in time._ He said this because it was a possibility. It would be unknown for all time. His deed remained. The waiting stretched on. Then: _So many people died worthlessly, everywhere. Even though we tried our best. So many of us were lost. So many people abandoned each other._

They were both so still.

_So many of us were lost. Even you._

The ship hummed.

_Listen to me, Hajime._

He did, always.

_I don’t want you to be lost for nothing._

He stayed against the wall, breathing.

Iwaizumi, a navigator, a man of loyalty, began to lift his head. His warm breath was so close to the wall it flowed back over his own cheeks like a fond touch. He kept his head against that wall.

_Don’t start to sink, okay? Not you. Not you._

Iwaizumi breathed. He asked Ushijima to touch him once. But they both knew this could not be done. 

_Endure, Hajime. Take me to victory._

He promised he would.

When an impact sounded on the north hull, Iwaizumi was ready to stand.

He walked tall. He went to the flight deck. The social-outcast creature floated by the window and watched him. Today it was fully solid. As ever, it had long fingers, humanlike hair, and a few thin green stripes around its abdomen and shoulders that had a bioluminescent glow. Yet it looked more human today than it ever had.

More stripe-shapes glowed in the blank space behind it. Colors spread infectiously out of them till they filled the outlines of moving bodies. In time they became solid: companion creatures, humanshaped and floating and with stripes of their own. One had a spiked protrusion on its head, one had marks like black eyebrows upon its face. The original lolled its pink tongue and glowered. It shaped that mouth into a humanlike grin, the eyes above squinted in a conniving glare. It had a spike-ended tail, twice the length of its body. All of them did. All were raised in a threat.

The three were in a line, a union of their species. Today he was outnumbered.

_Oh, Christ._

-

They stalked him.

He tracked them by their body heat and by the vibrations they emitted. They floated around the solar panels like eels through coral. Their claws tapped along the hull, their heads butted it. They were curious and explorative creatures. As they discovered more and more of his shuttle, they pushed the limits of what could be done to pester it, or to break it.

When they came too close, the navigator pushed back. With drills, hammers or projectiles, he punished them for their bullheaded pestering by mauling them.

Once their bodies were torn, they floated limply away—for a while. Even when he shot retractable wires into their flesh and electrocuted them till their flesh started to cook, they returned. Once two of them drifted into range of extraneous thrusters that burned them till they cooked entirely. Their crisp bodies floated end-over-end into space while two more flitted frantically around their twitching bodies.

 _Godspeed, cunts. Hope you die_.

They never did.

Each part of the body crushed or torn returned. Even bodies ripped in half grew back or stitched together again, though it took many weeks. And after one period of many weeks, he could not put off a walk to the water filtration tank any longer.

He kissed Tory the tyrannosaurus and set him on an elliptical, thereby transforming him into a goal for that day. Iwaizumi must complete this mission so that he could return to Tory and accomplish his daily workout.

He suited up for a spacewalk from the midpoint of the ship to the aft end. The airlock door opened. 

There was nothing around but a drifting comet in the far distance, silent and white. He was safely alone in the infinite dark.

The journey was quick, unfettered. Past the soldier-like battalions of solar panels, past the engine block and heavy storage armor. Three-quarters down the ship by the aft was the main water filter. Its panel came unlocked easily, dispensed easily, took a replacement receptor easily. From this view, the ship’s many dents and scars were visible. Nothing had ever come close to rupturing, but there were dozens of minor dents from impacts with debris and—and predators. His skin crawled under his suit.

A sudden alarm in the helmet told him to run for his life. The predators were coming.

Iwaizumi followed the route faster than ever before: hand over hand on the handholds, nearly requiring the air jets to realign himself when he missed one and nearly floated off. None of the creatures were in sight yet.

 _Take me to victory,_ Ushijima had said, so he did not stop.

Iwaizumi instead took himself off the usual route to a different airlock entrance than usual. It was closer, but with a longer code required for entry. While he punched digits into the panel, the alarm in his suit sounded quadruple signals of four unique heat signatures.

He foolishly spared a glanced up. One of them was crawling between the forest of solar panels above. Atop its head was brunette-colored hair. It was the outcast attacking first, pupils shrunk to nothing. 

The airlock opened and Iwaizumi pushed inside with a shout.

Over his head there was metallic clattering and bumping as the being crawled down the hull to him—two of them did. One of them grabbed at his suit as the door automatically closed. Iwaizumi’s mind quit all efforts and tried to faint. It left him to protocol instead of thought.

He could not breathe. He twisted in the thing’s grip, flipping entirely so he could kick the attacker in the belly. There was a vibration pulsing into him like an indignant scream near his head. The force made him rocket into the airlock foyer. He struck a wall. The door closed and sealed but he still wasn’t breathing.

Air was evacuating the suit through a horizontal tear in the arm. Pressure was returning to the chamber at the same time, beating on his ears and throat. Iwaizumi collapsed to the floor. The helmet fell off and hit the tiles with an undignified _clank-clank-CLANK._

Outside the little window in the door, a man’s face looked in: the red-mouthed outcast, now with narrowed brown eyes and an open, conniving mouth with lips. It was the face of a rotten bastard who was cheating, was knowing. Finally the navigator, too, became knowing.

How foolish to label this one an inept outcast. How shortsighted, to not see that it danced with danger first and most often, received the most wounds and that it _led_ its pack in these hunting parties in pursuit of him. It had followed him and brought the others to follow him. It knew how to smile. It was truly intelligent life, almost human in its persistence. So close to humanity that it came close to capturing him. 

_Take me to victory_ was such a fucking stupid thing to say when he had nearly been pulled away from the open door and into an open mouth.

The smiling thing twitched its fingers to catch his attention. Its hand briefly seemed to be inside the glass. Iwaizumi squinted his eyes and then averted them. It meant he was beginning to hallucinate, which itself meant he was farther gone than he even realized.

The shaking of his arms and legs was nigh uncontrollable. His heartrate was lightning-fast and nauseating. He gritted his teeth and tried to move anyway, watched by the leader of the hunting pack. He rose by grabbing the nearby staircase railing and pulling forward. With it steadying him, he managed a stiff, horrible walk up the short metal stair steps to the hall beyond.

The walk was short and then the railing was gone and then he could no longer stand. After turning the corner, he fell onto his knees. He sat just out of sight of that window, shaking for hours and then days.

-

Nothing was out there but death. Nothing was in here but inevitable, slower death. 

I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to lie in the sun, he would cry as he held himself. He held Tory, he held a cold pillow, he stood empty in a hall for hours and held nothing, hardly breathing. He endured as he had promised and always held Tory.

_My beautiful, strong son._

Iwaizumi sat down to rest and avoid thinking about anything. He righted himself yet again, kept moving.

Sitting in the flight deck, he felt the pleasant ache of his endurance run in the gym. Physically he was washed, warm, prepared to endure the day, but his heart and mind were too tangled to follow. The workout had dragged. He hadn’t spoken a word aloud in four days. He craved respite and he needed to start maintenance in the engine room in fifteen minutes.

He chose to be somewhere else for the next five: five imaginary minutes with Wakatoshi would set him right. Then he’d return to reality, perhaps scramble some eggs for dinner. These thoughts would be smothered by a high tide of pleasure and the destressed wake of it afterward.

He palmed himself over his trousers once, but that pale friction wasn’t enough when imagining Ushijima. He imagined it was a different hand than his, more force, more something he liked. One hand was at his own thigh, pulling the leg forcefully away like it blocked the way to a fine prize. With the other he palmed himself again so teasingly it was painful. A fantasy quickly sprung to action.

In the fantasy, Ushijima was here and understood exactly what he wanted and he even wanted it, too. They were in a closet at the cadet school after a victorious game. Their sweat shone in the near-dark. They fought to wrestle each other’s clothes up out of the way, to make room for their tongues to lave up each other’s skin. In the pilot’s chair, he licked at his fingers briefly. He leaned his head back into the headrest, that his imagined captain could explore his neck and collar.

Instead of sucking at his collar with the impromptu wet fingers Iwaizumi had prepared for himself, Ushijima in the fantasy shoved his jersey up to his collar and held it there. It made him bare from collar to pelvis as he longed to be in front of him. Iwaizumi jerked his hips forward, swaying his whole torso, so Ushijima could know what his body looked like while fucking.

You make me so hard, he would pant, and then asked to touch him back.

Ushijima thumbed at his nipples and told him to wait. Iwaizumi hissed while his body was played with and declared he didn’t want to wait. But he did not move. Ushijima continued to explore him; Iwaizumi let him. He did not move out of turn. Even in a fantasy, he would not act against his captain’s command.

You can touch whatever you want to, he would offer in order to encourage him more, but Ushijima would probably not say anything. The fantasies changed at times, because in truth he didn’t know what Ushijima would say. And he never would. 

He drew up more ideas for the dream. This time, the captain told his loyal spiker that his body was beautiful. Exceptional. He knew this; he cared for this body in the gym six days of the week and fed it savory, healthy food so that it would always be strong. Iwaizumi’s fingers were sweat-stained now and slid over the admirable curve of his pectorals, the nipples tight as Ushijima could make them. Ushijima gave him his tongue, lapping at his nipple once, then a second time, stronger. It rocked his whole body, that tongue. It rocked his whole fucking head thinking of Ushijima’s mouth and tongue treating him the way he wanted to be treated. He must give back, he must love him back. 

Let me suck your dick, he would say, and he would even add _please_ and it would definitely work out so that his captain said yes, and he would be the first man to be on his knees in front of Ushijima Wakatoshi.

He opened his eyes in a few soft blinks, shamelessly wanting to see it in front of him. But Wakatoshi’s heavy cock wasn’t there. There was a tall person standing a short distance ahead of him, staring. After two more pumps along his own wet cock the fantasy bled fully away.

Here in reality the smiling creature was standing in front of him. It seemed taller than usual. Because it was closer.

It did not float before the flight deck window but had the window glass to its back. Because it was standing inside the room.

It made him flaccid and cold and thoughtless. For a moment Iwaizumi wanted to cry. Then his reality changed again when the creature disappeared and reappeared and seemed shorter—because it was farther now. It was outside of the window now and fully solid. Immediately it began to thrash against the window like a rabid beast.

Its hands and head and tail and tentacle arms beat against the glass so quickly he hardly discern one limb from another. It beat into the navigator’s soul till it became a brand that could not be erased. Once he felt that mark, he halted himself from blinking.

If only he had blinked a few more times, it could have stayed where it was. If he had kept it in his sightline, but had his eyes closed, it could have moved to that spot permanently. It was as certain as the need for food, for self-preservation: if he blinked again, it could change its location. It could make itself in the room again.

Its burst of anger died out. The hands went still on the window’s glass. Iwaizumi remained a mess of breathy pants and shivering limbs, focusing his sight on the creature’s forehead rather than its direct gaze. 

His hand was out of his waistband, but his mussed shirt remained caught all the way up his torso. He hadn’t the strength to raise a hand and pull it back down, so he sat with his sweating flesh exposed. Too weak to move, like the gentlest of prey.

The creature knew this about him. Its chance to catch him defenseless was lost. It gazed on his sweet form. The only thing in its eyes was desire. Iwaizumi felt a brainless, confounding impulse to react to it, as he would to a human that wanted him.

Behind it, there were four long limbs swaying slow like the body of a creature underwater. The red mouth was open and moving now. Its pink tongue came out. The tip of the tongue licked the glass with agonizing slowness as tongues in fantasies moved. The tentacles swept up and down with the same intensity. The flight deck was silent as the empty space outside.

Another appendage low on its torso passed in and out of view, caressed by the others. Iwaizumi’s head pulled apprehensively back when he realized the lower appendage was not another tongue.

The tentacles mimicked the uniquely male motion of self-pleasure along the new organ. The red tongue appeared again. It licked at the barrier of glass in lieu of the warm flesh it wanted to taste. What it couldn’t have with its mouth it was absorbing with its eyes, which narrowed and fluttered in reaction to its own touch. Without doubt, without arrogance, both knew its source of pleasure was the navigator and nothing else.

Every man alive in every time recognized those actions, by instinct if not by name. It was a human condition. It was a condition of the creature at the window. It saw the navigator touching himself moments ago, and it reciprocated. It knew pleasure at the sight of him. It thought him _compatible_ for that gratification.

The shape wasn’t quite right, but the head was red and hard. The other limbs pumping along it were spreading thick fluid around the shaft. The other tentacles batted against the glass in a light mockery of their enraged thrashing from before, asserting that desire to reach through. They batted the glass, they gratified the creature’s cock, they waved and glowed to capture his attention. It grinned like a man who enjoyed being watched, and Iwaizumi did watch.

A flash of Ushijima came to mind, but it was snuffed out like dim starlight. A thought for protocol rose up, but it floated away. There was nothing before him but this creature that wanted him. A new line was drawn in their long-standing chase. Iwaizumi’s breath was shuddering. His body would soon follow.

Carefully and with purpose, he reached for the weapons console. The creature withdrew from the window slightly, all too familiar with the actions that preceded an attack. But it didn’t move far or fast or halt its gratification. Its brows rose up and pulled together, its tongue lolled unabashedly out. It looked like it was nearing a climax of its own. Iwaizumi coded something on the console to interrupt it.

Wires deployed from below the flight deck window and shot forth into the creature’s thighs and belly. It twitched once from the sting of impact, still smiling at him. It communicated to him with its body that it was unhurt and it would not stop.

One tentacle reached for the window again to stroke longingly on the surface. Iwaizumi, stone-faced, slammed the input button.

Electricity shot up the wires and the creature’s lustful expression evaporated. It coiled up from the pain. The extremities twitched. The red mouth was half-open in agony. Sparks streaked over its shining flesh. The other members of the pack were pulling away in alarm as the sparks got longer and their reach wider.

Iwaizumi watched the impressive blue-gold lightshow for only a few seconds more before moving off the pilot’s chair and walking stiffly to the exit. He weakly pulled his shirt down to his waist again. The wires would disconnect and decontaminate themselves. His safety would be guaranteed, temporarily, once more. The creature would skulk away to lick its wounds and regroup with its pack. It would leave him alone for a while.

Once he passed the flight deck’s threshold, he heard its hand beat on the glass but did not look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this far! Idk when Chapter 2 will come out, as I'm currently obsessed with the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, owe a very late chapter to a Naruto story, and even another OiIwa story that I only wrote 1 chapter for last year but still adore. (Do you like FHQ and OiIwa and baby Iwaizumi keeping bff Tooru's demon nature a secret for years? Maybe read [Darcia?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21038969/chapters/50042813))
> 
> Some story/writing extras, if you're interested:
> 
> \- Idea came from "Aniara", a 1950s epic sci-fi Swedish POEM about a spaceship of passengers that gets knocked off its course to Mars and never makes it home. Also a Swedish 2019 movie. I read the poem online, it takes 2 or 3 hours and is just soul-crushing. I felt at odds writing a character I love having to experience misery on this level of intensity. It's okay, Iwa-chan...there's an alien out there who loves u very much
> 
> \- When I started the oneshot I had the idea that Iwaizumi would not have any spoken dialogue up to a certain point, just occasional thoughts/mental remarks of "Oh, Christ" in various situations, and then his first actual dialogue would be "Oh Christ". And then he'd have normal dialogue after that point. Just because the idea amused me. I ended up changing his first line, which is in Chap 2, to something else before normal dialogue takes over after that. But the idea of Iwaizumi purposefully not having any spoken lines for a long time remains.
> 
> \- At first I felt certain that Ushijima died on that falling Traveler but it kept making me excessively sad and I really like Ushijima, so I'm not sure anymore. There were clues in the scene where Hajime "saw" him in the arbor room that he was indeed dead, much of his dialogue was supplied by conversations Hajime had in the past or with other people, etc.
> 
> \- While writing I drifted back and forth on how humanlike the aliens are, if their skin is green or how green, whether or not they have tails, etc...maybe a greenish tint to their skin, but regular human color skin sometimes, but definitely the abdomen stripes, I like those...and they don't always have tails because Iwaizumi rips those off sometimes, pffft...Just make them how hot you want in your head, that's what I did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween. Let's visit with some aliens. (For Mintoche and North!) 
> 
> By the end of this chap, or maybe NEAR the end, we are looking at timeskip Iwa with hair parted on the left. To give you an idea of time passage (as I have been deliberately vague on that) and on Iwa's hair lol.

He was safe in the engine clearing room, as close to the center of the ship as possible. On a nearby tablet, the leader’s heat signature was fluttering across the screen as it circled the ship. It stopped before many of the windows. It was looking for him. It and its pack did not leave for four more hours. Iwaizumi lay on the floor of the engine room, hiding from them.

Some years ago, hiding would have felt against his nature. He hardly did it as a child. Not as a cadet, either. And not a navigator. But he was none of those things to the monsters at the window. He shuddered to think of what he was in the mind of the unkillable monster. He shuddered because he knew now and there was no stopping it. There was no anticipated high tide of pleasurable thoughts of Ushijima to distract from this. None of his plush friends were stationed in the engine clearing room to comfort him. There was nothing for billions of miles but this.

There were no Travelers out here. There never would be.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing—he lifted his head slightly and slammed it back down to the floor to flatten and kill that thought. 

There would never be anything but these creatures, whatever they were.

There was no telling if they were the original predators that set their sights on Earth some thirty-five years ago now, or newcomers. There had been many different invaders that day. The race that had been approaching for decades landed first. They came in spacecraft and all others came later, through black holes that opened around the earth like eager, stealing mouths.

There may have been six or seven of them all within that one day, as he remembered. But Iwaizumi had no desire to remember. He placed his wrist both over his eyes and then closed them. He hid.

Underneath his shielding arm he pondered things with quiet carefulness. The things he’d seen from the sky in his shuttle, this shuttle, he reminded himself firmly. There were multiple types of invaders, scatted all across the globe without pattern. No coordination. No relation. The various ones after the originals might have even been drawn there _because_ the originals. By the commotion of a large predator felling a great kill. The others might have been scavengers hoping for a mouthful of meat. The long-tailed humanoids’ harassment resonated with that. Somewhat.

So much time had passed since the brown-eyed one first appeared at his flight deck window and started this chase. So much failure to scavenge anything. They wasted absurd amounts of time and risked absurd dangers, just for the promise of a relatively small bite of food. Did they all think they would get a share? But maybe they didn’t view it as a waste if the pursuit was for something to breed with.

This thought was new. A foreign touch on the mind that he could not translate. And it wouldn’t leave. With his eyes covered, looking at just a blanket of dark, he could easily reach for the thought again. Just to see what it did. Dumbfounded, horrified, he touched it again. 

He saw the smiling creature in his mind’s eye: taking itself in hand like a human male would. Openly touching itself at the sight of Iwaizumi doing the same. It curved its body over the gentle arc of the flight deck window so he would behold its strong muscle and the blatantly erect state of its cock, or whatever the hell that appendage was that looked like one. He wanted it to be one.

Oh Christ, he did want it to be one.

Oh Christ.

If only it were a man. Not a conniving replica of one that taunted him with its familiarity, but an earthborn man. If he just pretended it was a man, then attraction to it was only normal; nature had made him that way. If it was just a man it wouldn’t want to kill and consume him. If he made it a man it could not hurt him.

The doors to the engine clearing room were shut. He was deep within the ship. Iwaizumi covered his eyes with the back of his arm and buried himself even deeper.

He started with its body, because he had been so cruelly ripped away from his desire for his captain’s body just minutes before. And also because he liked it. The alien had the look of a man born with a slim frame but had later grown muscular and strong, which he so admired. It spoke of initiative, ambition and familiarity with hard work. When it hunted or followed him, its body moved with practiced rhythm like an athlete, which he appreciated. That unyielding persistence, in a man, he appreciated.

It had a cute smile and hair that looked soft to the touch. If he let the thought of touching it remain, he found that he liked it overwhelmingly. Maybe he just hadn’t touched anything with a pulse in five or six years and his standards were now rock-bottom-and-even-if-it-will-literally-kill-me—kill me? Does it want to _kill me?_

That thought stuck like a burr. Stung. Some other thoughtless lobe of his brain heedlessly, fearfully, swept that away.

The thought of its body and fluffy hair remained wrapped around him when he retreated to his bedroom and fell defeated onto his back. Two pillows supported his head and upper back on the mattress. Tory was not in the room so he would not have to watch.

Once he lay down, he was so quickly re-aroused that it stunned him, as though there had been invisible, cancerous particles of this feeling hidden inside Iwaizumi’s body all along. Now they were coming to life. Now he was as an animal going into heat. These dissonant things inside him—agony, terror, thrill, pleasure, a sting like nostalgia for home and for earthgrown grass—all coalesced into a volcanic wave that Iwaizumi could not withstand. So he fell. He let himself be taken.

This time instead of barely leaning back in a leather pilot’s chair he was lying almost fully back, almost as comfortable as could be, in his own safe nest in the heart of his home. Iwaizumi imagined the man-no-no- _no_ beautiful creature wrapping around him and he embracing it with as much fervor, though fewer limbs. He could hold its head softly in his hands and feel along the fine jawline. He could also instead rattle that head with a growl and a chuckle, twist it into a headlock and playfully wrestle with it. That would be nice, since he hadn’t wrestled anybody in ages. It would probably win the playfight with a cheating amount of limbs. As much physical punishment as it took, it was probably stronger than he was.

The charming play lasted only a few seconds in his head. For the rest, Iwaizumi was the creature’s own to play with. For the rest, he was giving and allowed it what it wanted. He imagined it demanding attention and obedience from him with its eyes and its mute but animated mouth. It openly leered at his body and at his face, because it wanted _him_ to make a face or react. He tried to hide his smile just a little, but it didn't really work. How cute, that it tried to pester him, that it consciously knew how to be cute. 

It explored him as it wished with its hands like any person would. It used its tentacle limbs too. They were warm and a little wet at the ends. Iwaizumi twitched at the feel of them at first, but then he loved them. They behaved as tongues did towards sumptuous foods, unable to keep from long licks along his body. Two of them wrapped around his forearms and their ends oscillated around his wrists like fingers moving back and forth over the skin. They all felt separate from its real tongue, which was large and red. When its real tongue tasted the skin on his neck and collarbone; they both shuddered. 

The creature’s own hand was on his thigh, squeezing there with excitement to hold that hard muscle in its own hand and to hold its own cock tantalizingly close to its prize.

Iwaizumi looked slightly down at his own shaft in disbelief at himself for being this erect, at this of all things— _are you sure?_ —before he stopped looking.

In his mind, every stroke on his own cock came with a matching thrust of the beast’s hips against his, its torso over his. He fell backward against the pillows in shaking increments. Till he was nearly supine and nearly shouting his pleasure.

A suggestion threaded in: he knew he could climb higher than this, or he had in the past with men who weren’t present right now. There were a few men somewhere out there in the cold stardust who approached him, engaged him, and mounted him against walls or pinned against the floor while he shouted. But this one was a greater man than any of them.

The suggestion was to realize that, and feel it. Hajime was enacting this compulsion before he realized it, arm reaching back and down to place he might as well have forgotten about by now. The first finger was nothing much and he wasn’t here for “nothing much” so the second one was added too quickly and it hurt. When he tried to slow down or pause the daydream punished him for it. It hurt, to not be touched or touching someone. Like it really was on his bed right now, watching him whine.

He and it together worked at his flesh till it remembered that pleasure was on the other end of this, then assaulted him with it. He actually scratched himself with his index finger but felt no pain. There was no room for it. The movements came back so easily to him after a time without. It was his own desire and actions, but he didn’t see or feel that. The reality of his own hand was armored over with a picture of the beautiful creature, doing this itself, fucking him like it had been denied for years because it had.

He longed for this. The pursuit of this high was unabashedly insane but he kept riding it. There had been a few men who beautifully broke him in this way he was wanting now, he realized again. People he could never forget. He would never see them. They would never hurt him. The man—the thing—in his body and over it right now would want to share a kiss right now and not dig his nails into Iwaizumi’s naked stomach.

It would not bear a grudge for the many times Iwaizumi had obscenely gored his body.

It wouldn’t want to tear Iwaizumi open with his bare hands in return.

This thing would not attack him nor eat him alive, not this _man_. But it wasn’t a man, even in the dream right now.

In the dream he pretended that its last thrusts were uneven and wild and its wild face was changing helplessly because of him. Its face was a beautiful sight even when it came inside him, mouth open and hair falling and it demanding he take all it would give him. Its tentacle limbs held him down harder than ever when it drove him to his peak a little after. Then he couldn’t see it anymore, only feel it and its weight.

It held him down when he writhed and gasped. It took its first bite when he was orgasming. Hajime’s blissful, jagged exhale became a shout and then a rending, shrieking cry of agony. It pulled away part of his abdomen in its mouth. Threads of flesh and blood vessels hung from that piece of meat. It swallowed that piece of him. It ducked again and bit into him lower, by his hip. The bone crunched in its mouth. It was a pain he had never felt and could not contain.

In reality, Hajime’s orgasm was almost as long and merciless as that in the dream. Long, strong, heavenly. Yet as he writhed in the bed his whole mind was painted with the smeared viscera of his body being pulled away in pieces. The creature's seed may not even need a living body to grow in. Its seed might eat him, too. The others might come and eat, too, now that their king had bred. He might die crying.

He did cry.

No matter how his mind bent and how he curled up in shame around his pillows, the truth remained in front of him. The truth remained in his mind under the red gore of his torn-out body. It was not a man, no matter its familiar and sweet shape. But Hajime was one, a fucking shameful stain of one.

What good sensations there had been were swiftly draining out. Shame was crawling up and spreading. Breeding.

Hajime tried to roll off the bed, nearly fell, and then shot up with a loud, loud sob. He whirled around and had to look at the little mess on the ruffled bed. He had to remove the sheets and carry them, half-clothed, down the hall to a laundry room. He picked a washing machine he rarely used and dropped them in with enough soap for all his gym clothes. He returned later to add the pillows to a second washing machine. Then removed what clothes he still had on and added them in.

The two washers began to soothingly spin and clean the shame out of his bedding. He watched the water move in the two round little windows.

Hajime sat nude on the laundry room floor.

-

_DATE-TIME 9.24.2118-0803:_

_1 st sighting of extraterrestrial since leav ing Earth and it’s the same kind that crashed into the flight deck window. MUST TRANSCRIBE THIS PAPER TO COMPUTER LOG LATER_

_Bipedal semi inteligent carnivorous regenerative tissue?? Hair and hair folicles on head and nowhere else. Resemblance to human body shope remarkable. Slight difference in skin tone. Or trick of light unsure. Slight green? Abdominal stripes extend from below latissimus dorsi muscles to below pectoral muscle, three count. Long TAIL extend from human tailbone five to six ft in length. Tapered end. Light shine on skin causes flicker? If you blink it flickers. Around six feet tall or a bt more and slim build. Swimmers body I wish Ohira was here. Want to go home_

_-_

_DATE TIME 11.13.2118-1123:_

_Seen them 2 more times since last entry. I forgot this page was here in the bottom storage room._

_Might keep a few notes like this in paper form rather than typing into computer log. Not more than once in a blue moon am I going to let these things have more space in my head and my life than they’ve already brute-forced their way into. Above entry is also shit anyhow. I was scared. Will return to proper writing protocol. I’ll inform Dog Major Lucky of my failure to adhere to writing protocol tonight at EOD checkin later._

_Last entry that I write like this._

_Maybe I’ll just add to this page when I come by this room for monthly cleaning or whenever I get to it. I can keep real notes computerized. Like paper notes are even gonna help. Maybe I can draw on these. Pencil is good_

_There’s eight of them. They do not always show up together, like some get left behind. Or maybe they’re following other things. ~~They a~~_

_They are some scary motherfuckers. But I have Tory and Cat Captain Hitoka, under their guidance I will persevere I think_

(poor sketch of a cat and a bipedal dinosaur)

_-_

_I forgot about this page for a while_

_DATE-TIME: 1.1.2119-0748:_

_Happy new year Wakatoshi. – Lieutenant Iwaizumi Hajime, 44 th Engineering Division _

_-_

_DATE TIME 3.30.2119-0803: Outside growery, second south facing window_

_Number 6 bared teeth at Number 12 and what appeared to be teeth were visible inside the throat but retracted into the flesh. Teeth/bones? Flagella for pulling prey into the mouth?_

_Wondering how they move themselves through space. Flagella would have no impact in an airless environment. How do they propel themselves forward? Gas expulsion from the skin or the tentacles? Bodily movements rarely match directions the tentacles point or move. Magnetism with particles of_

_I’m an idiot_

_Why do I come to this room._

_I could type up these notes and trash the paper but I like the New Year line. For his name and the fact that I almost forgot my rank._

_Captain Wakatoshi Ushijima_

_Captain Wakatoshi Ushijima_

_Major Tory Tyrannosaurus WRECKS_

_-_

_DATE TIME 4.17.2119-1134: Piston #34 deployed and pierced Number 6 right through its chest! Bullseye_

_Impact made 6 swung away towards the aft of the shuttle. Nearly down to rudder plates 1-5. Number 12 moved in uneven patterns around it, worried? Number 2 and 3 smiling with their mouths open? LAUGHING??_

_Numbers 1 and 7 continued to float around and peer in the windows by the storage sections. Staring at plastic bins and boxes for god knows how long. Thinking I would walk by I guess._

_-_

_DATE TIME 7.03.2119-1845: Numbers 2 and 3 swam/crawled through the solar plates for almost 3 hours. Maybe seeking warmth. I think I have strep throat?_

_-_

_DATE TIME 7.04.2119-1420: Number 1 is a cunt_

_-_

_DATE TIME 8.09.2119-2024:_

_2 – Yukon_

_3 - ??_

_7 - Minami_

_12 – ~~Rockies~~ plural doesn’t work as a name_

_12- Rocky (Better?)_

_1 - ~~Fuji~~_

_1 - ~~Everest~~_

_1 – ~~Rainier~~ _

_1 - ~~Denali~~ _

(Sketch of a snow-capped mountain, sketch of a velociraptor, sketch of another mountain)

(The entire page is crumpled, anyway)

-

_REDO_

_3 Hana (but it’s male? I guess)_

_3 Hanamaki (this one has bubblegum pink hair there is no god. 3 looks like a guy who would laugh at god)_

_13 - Kuni ?? Kimi Kunimi_

_Kawa_

(Sketch of a curving river in the foreground and mountain in the background. Long, waving lines and small scratches of shadows on grass, on the mountainside, on grass, sand grains and pebbles, the long blurred distance between the riverbank and the peak, a drawing he liked, Hitoka would have complimented it)

_1 – Oikawa_

_What the fuck am I doing_

(This page is folded in half)

-

Iwaizumi found these old pages, typed a few of them up into to supplement his official logs, and burned the papers in a fireplace.

-

Iwaizumi endured as usual, against the dark outside and sometimes against himself. He lasted a long time. He lost today.

Today he sat in a chair in one of the mechanical rooms, where spare parts were bolted to the walls and the floor. The window in this room was large enough to drive a few cars through, close in size to the one in the flight deck. He was looking out into an unnamed solar system with twenty-eight planets orbiting an A-type main sequence star. It would burn blueish white if it was close enough to see, but at this distance it was barely larger than any of the typical stars. He had pens and paper and could draw an approximation of it right now if he wanted. 

Iwaizumi retracted the shuttle’s main solar panels, set out the spares for charging, and waited. And he wondered if he was dead already.

He thought on his aliens, with his eyes carefully closed. He thought on one of their last visits, where Number 6, the one with silvery hair, had been carrying an object in its hands. It lifted it up in one hand and it was clearly trying to make him look at it. It appeared to be one of his tablets that he’d thrown out and ejected in the trash compactor some months ago. The screen had irreparably cracked when he’d gotten a little drunk in the cafeteria, thrown the thing up and failed to catch it before it hit the floor.

It was a wonder he hadn’t seen them playing with his ejected trash before like goddamned raccoons. It was strange that he hadn’t seen them interacting with any of it before. It upset him. Gravely. To see these animal beasts lifting up a tablet he used to log maintenance, weather and watch movies. To see them handling an object.

To look into their eyes and, with thundering shock, see not animal hunger and curiosity but expressions he had names for. Questions. Demands.

_Is this yours?_

_Do you want this?_

_Do you want to come out and get it?_

He let them have the tablet; it made no difference to his usual treatment of swatting them away. The creatures were nevertheless opportunistic beasts. They calculated risk and reward, performed coordinated teamwork, recognized patterns, and much more. Like the cleverest of animals. But not just that. 

Iwaizumi wiped his hand over his face in exasperation but did not open his eyes. Just wondered to the blank darkness of his eyelids what the hell he was doing. He could get up and leave and keep swatting the creatures as they came, as ever, into nameless star systems and asteroid belts and years of silence. He had plenty of engine maintenance and fiber repair to keep him busy in the next few weeks at least. The monthly rewatch of _King of the Monsters_ was coming up in three days.

But the idea was loose from his subconscious now and it was so dangerous to not consider it. And yet dangerous _to_ consider it. It would be, or it already was, the greatest danger he had ever encountered.

The creatures floated in the empty ether and looked at each other with eye-to-eye focus and engagement that could almost match human verbal conversation. They would push each other playfully like friends, or harshly like teammates. They had intensely complicated and familiar facial expressions and understood the meaning of them on each other. They understood the meaning of his own expressions. Like the commonest human being.

It begged, rather demanded, the question of whether their minds more resembled animals’ or more resembled his own. Or perhaps theirs was a network entirely different from either one, and he was only seeing it in human terms and expressions because it was the only way a man could. But the most alarming possibility was the middle: that their minds were humanlike, that they were like him. That they may have similar intelligence to a man, but simply lack for man’s technology, equipment and knack for material possessions. Rather than these, they just an infinitely regenerating body, social structure and wits.

Rather than being man-shaped animals, there lay the venomous possibility that they had more humanlike behaviors than just facial expressions. There was no telling what other behaviors they exhibited that he just didn't see. There was no telling if they were smart enough to hide things. _T_ _o lie._

There was no telling anything about anything about anything about anything about anything abou—

—about anything about anything about _anything_ —

Heat sensory alarms were going off on his watch, and a tablet locked in the nearby wall. Iwaizumi obeyed calming protocol measures that helped him keep still in his chair.

He waited a little longer till there was a little more beeping. Then there was less. Then more. Then he looked.

Kunimi was floating before the window, a little above him. Today he had no tail, but two tentacles rising out from the back of his shoulders. He looked a little exhausted and put-upon as he always did, this rather little one of the alien clan. 

Iwaizumi’s hand under his chin gripped into a fist under his jaw instead. His face twisted into a scowl of hate. At himself. He’d used the goddamn _name_ he made up. Another factor that made him believe he may be dead already, and made an engagement like this necessary for his own safety.

 _‘Number 13.’_

He did not need to remind himself not to blink. When he had to, he would avert his gaze entirely first so that they weren’t even in his periphery. By now this was protocol.

13 resembled a human male like all the others. It had nothing between its legs, not even any visible slit of skin, and too-sharp claws and toes to be a human being. It had hair in a style he didn’t really like and dark green stripes on both its thighs. It moved slowly. Iwaizumi had seen it punched into empty space by his weapons like a cartoon catapult more than a few times.

From the top of the window came Number 3, upside down, the one with pink hair. It was crawling over the window for a few steps and then it pushed off to float by it. It looked up to the higher floors of the ship, staring up and away with wide eyes. Iwaizumi ignored it. Two more came into view, and Iwaizumi did not bother to identify them or number them. He only sat with his chin resting on his first and his ankles crossed, making himself available to be observed. He had never set himself before them so blatantly, or if he did, he had frantically blacked it out.

Number 1 sped up from below view of the window and paused in its center, where it could look directly at the navigator within. Iwaizumi thought of the name he’d picked for it in a faraway manner, as though he were looking across the room at the thought. Many rooms away, and yet wrapped around his skin, was a more deeply intimate thought than its name. The creature outside the window had been in his bed once, in a dream. In two other places since. And now here. 

Iwaizumi’s fist became tighter and his scowl uglier. He sat where he was, meaning to be observed. He made sure to maintain that face of controlled anger. Nothing else.

Number 1, the leader, floated where it was. Its tail did not move at all. It had three other tentacles today, and these all slowed into perfect stillness till its entire body was suspended in space with neither force nor motion acting upon it. Perhaps it was waiting for him this time. Iwaizumi wanted this encounter over with and stop having to look it in the eye, so he got started.

There were pens and paper by his feet, and a little tape. He picked up all of these and held them in his lap, thinking. But the decision was already made: he would start simply. He took one of the pens and wrote something. Then he took a bit of the tape and stuck it to the top of the paper while standing up from the chair. He walked forward. As he did, the creature floated forward. Its hand touched against the glass as it often did.

Iwaizumi risked one glance up at it and found it wasn’t looking at his eyes, but a little below his face. Maybe at his collarbone. The eyes swung a little left, then right. Maybe it could sense or see bloodflow under the skin, like savory juice running through a steak. Weird thought to have about something you wanted to fuck.

Iwaizumi wanted to kick himself. He set the paper onto the glass, facing them. It just read:

_Hello_

This drew the leader’s eye.

It kept staring at the paper even when Iwaizumi stepped back, waiting with crossed arms for some reaction. The others all reacted with more animated movements: they leaned in close, pushed or propelled as though in water or by magic, so they could all look at the writing. 6 and 7 looked at each other, and 2 looked at 1. Iwaizumi looked only at 1, for he would not risk being engaged with any of the others, too.

It wasn’t as though they would know what it meant or be able to write a response, or so he told himself. The creatures did not handle or carry physical objects unless they were Iwaizumi's own or part of the shuttle. So if they lacked any writing utensils they might default to something of their own bodies: a display of blood, a pattern in their tentacles' waving, or in their flickering bodies. Or something else he hadn't seen before. Maybe something they'd been hiding up until this point, waiting for a time when he would actually attempt to communicate. It could be simply a different expression or body language. As he waited for a response, Iwaizumi realized he was shivering and had to consciously put a stop to it.

The leader moved away from the paper so it was to its side, no longer obscuring its view of Iwaizumi. Its hand settled on the glass again. And it smiled. And Iwaizumi continued to methodically suppress his shivering.

The black-browed Number 2 looked enamored with the page and gently pushed pink-haired 3 aside to see it. But the leader was temporarily distracted, its intrigue in his writing put away. Now its focus was on him yet again. Now Iwaizumi’s deep-seated paranoia was rising out of its nightmare cradle and into reality, because it certainly looked like the leader knew a secret of his and was very interested in it.

Iwaizumi thought of his secret, the writhing insanity of it, and felt no pleasure from it at all. He wanted to scream from the rotting guilt. He could only bear the humiliation by tackling it, piercing it, head-on.

He tore up a new piece of paper from the floor and wrote his own name on it. He slammed it flat onto the glass with one open hand. Forgot the tape. 

Now they all looked at the new page, even the leader. They all moved a little to get close and make curious expressions at it. A few tentacles were waving here and there, some hands pushed on each other or touched each other’s shoulders. A new hand touched the glass, then pulled away. 

The leader remained a little separate from the others centralizing themselves around the paper. He looked back and forth between Iwaizumi and his handwriting. Every second, it looked like it was understanding something and plotting. Iwaizumi twitched uncomfortably at the sudden flash of cadet memory, of looking across the court at a setter from an opposing school. One of the few times his team lost.

What the hell goes on in your head, he asked aloud, when it placed its open hand near his on the window. And it looked at him again, eyes dark and dotted with stars unseen by all of humankind, but for him.

Your guys must think you’re real brilliant to keep following your persistent bullshit, or else they’re too stupid to try following anyone else.

If you have anyone else. Maybe your whole species kicked you guys out for being such obnoxious shitheads.

You look like you’d be totally up your own ass if you were a human. I’d spike into your fuckin’ face if I saw you on a court.

Are you really gonna stare into my window for the rest of your life?

Really no other options in the whole universe for you, you horny bitch?

It doesn’t do you any good to keep following me for nothing.

Doesn’t do me any good to keep flicking you off my hide.

And I feel like you’re smart enough to get that. But you keep doing it.

I’m real tired of it.

I was taught to endure. Anything. Anything.

I was ready to leave my planet. My kind doesn’t do that, we never have. But we were going to do it, to keep surviving and be free and happy.

And my captain commanded me to stay standing.

So I’m going to. But. You sure love to make it difficult. You never stop. No matter how many times I tear you down, you pull yourself back together and try again. You’re the most persistent motherfucker alive. I think I admire that. Somehow.

Goddamn me. I guess because I’m not as strong as that. I worry eventually I’m gonna fall down one day. I’ll try to stay staying and my legs will just break. And I’ll die a failure. Alone.

God…oh my god. I don’t want to die alone.

I don’t want to die ‘cause of you, I don’t want to, I don’t want to fucking _be here_! But there’s nowhere else to be! The gym, I can go to the gym upstairs, fuckin’ yahoo, and I can shoot myself out a cannon into space and suffocate and die!

And will you still take my dead body then and use it, you disgusting piece of shit!? You wouldn’t care, would you? One-track-mind-obsessed freak! Leave me alone!

Do you understand me, bastard? I know you’ve got a brain in there, tell me you understand!

I want you out of my head, do you understand that?

I didn’t do anything to you! I don’t want to think about you, I want you out of my head!

I don’t deserve to feel like such scum! I was a good person before this happened!

I liked myself! People liked me! People could talk to me and touch me and I could be outside!

I want to go home for fuck’s sake!

_I hate this!_

_I hate you!_

_I hate what you’ve done to me!_

_Stop hurting me, I’ve had enough, if you hurt me again—_

Iwaizumi stopped shouting when he realized he’d blinked. Oikawa wasn’t outside the window anymore.

His tears made the room blur; the long rudders and plates and parts around him turned to silvery-black, waving stripes on the dark wall. Nearby he saw Oikawa standing on his toes in the room, one open-clawed hand outstretched and stepping forward. There was two more behind him. With silver hair. And pink.

Iwaizumi stretched his eyes wide and grasped at the chair behind him. He threw it forward, refused to blink, and the metal chair faded through the creatures entirely. They disappeared.

The chair crashed against the wall and broke into two pieces with a wild shout of metal-on-metal that stung his ears and vibrated into the floor.

They were outside again, because he hadn’t blinked again to cement them into their new place.

The creature he had named writhed madly and beat its hands against the glass. Then stopped. There was raw, human frustration in its heavy brows and open mouth. And then sorrow. It mirrored a man wailing in despair. 

Its fingertips bent on the glass as though trying to grasp it. Trying to grasp the navigator inside, always, always, wanting to reach in and hold him like he were its own and it longed to reunite.

Iwaizumi recognized this wanting, and thought of his dreams in the past and deep in the ship, and Oikawa’s animal hunger in the past, and its presence at the destruction of the earth, and all his time rotting alone in space, and his impression that they had all waited for him to let his guard down and ambush him while he was _talking_ to them just now, and could reconcile none of it. But it hurt. It hurt. That in no way did they hear him or care for his own sorrow. Then no one did. 

This time he was the one to beat his hands on the glass. The creature pulled back an arm-length, as though he’d struck it in the chest. His tears had started anew. A heavy pain in his hands had started anew. His fist beat and vibrated pain and he wailed in despair: Damn you, _god fucking damn you!_

Two of the creatures inched closer to the window, one of them with a placating hand. But he cared not to identify them or even humor the hand gesture as recognizably human. All that was humanlike about them was fake, it seemed. All that was humanlike about them was only for hunting, like animals, like agents of nature and not sentience or emotion. Like nothing.

He roared in the empty room so that his rage echoed inside it. The creatures all felt the vibrations he made. This was certain; this, they responded to. It was why they backed away from the window. 

The navigator whirled around and walked away with his teeth clenched and breath hissing through them.

Even now, he heard one of them hitting the glass at the other end of the room to grab his attention, but he would not deign it with a response. If they were greater than animals and understood him, if they grasped communication across species, then they could grasp his final hateful _fuck you_ goodbye.

-

Iwaizumi felt cool.

He walked at the pace of a foreman inspecting his workers, not because of a slow, careful focus but a slow, careful conservation of energy.

It was imperative to always keep going, but lately he’d been going rather slow. He hadn’t been to the gym in three days. His last electrical report to Frog Lieutenant Jones had been insufficient. Lieutenant Jones punished him by demanding 50 pushups of him then and there. He had managed 17 and then lay down next to Jones till both of them were totally quiet. His checkins today to all his superiors would be late.

He rose up off the floor only because he was cold and wanted warmth. The bathwater for the day was still cycling and cleaning, so he couldn’t run a hot bath. His bedroom was quite a far walk. But he didn’t need to go that far. He only needed to go where Tory was.

Iwaizumi walked slowly to the spare bedroom where he had left his dinosaur best friend. The familiar green shape made him pick up his speed for just a few steps, just enough to fall slowly into the bed and tuck his friend under his chin. Tory had a mouth full of carnivorous teeth and was known to eat triceratops, edmontosauruses, and even other tyrannosaurs. But Hajime trusted Tory even with his mouth pressed up against his throat. Tory loved him, this was unquestionable.

Hajime hummed a tune every couple of breaths, when he could manage it. Once in a while, Tory sang back. He had a beautiful voice. It soothed him to sleep, for a while. 

He left his bed that night one-third through the sleeping shift.

Slowly, taking his time, Hajime walked to the arbor rooms, avoiding any pathways that would take him past a window. He knew there was a star shower in view now, and there were no heat signatures indicating the enemies were near, but he avoided the possibility anyway. He did not want to think about them.

The walk was quiet and cool, with Tory cradled in one arm. After he turned a corner, he began to feel warm. And soft.

Hajime pictured the star shower outside, and the sun of this system glowing blue and white. He knew someone who would know that color by name and number. He pictured her blending it together with cute little pencils on expensive paper. He liked her.

Hajime pictured her there, and there she was. She cradled his hanging arm in hers like she used to, looked up lovingly at him.

 _Hi Captain,_ he addressed her sleepily, and it made her giggle. He forgot why he’d chosen to make her outrank him.

 _‘I’m Cat Captain Hitoka,’_ she agreed, and of course she would squeeze his arm. But her grin burst into a wide, worried frown. She asked if ‘captain’ was the correct rank. She never learned all the navigator ranks, she had nothing to do with navigator business except through her father, and of course, knowing him. She asked if that was the right one, was it, was it? He assured it her it was. Several years after he’d last seen her, he kept a glowing cat lamp and named it after her and given it that rank, and she was Cat Captain Hitoka to him now, and that all made sense.

That all made her reassured. Her tension wafted dramatically out of her when she sighed and shook her shoulders. Hajime looked down on her holding him and remembered how fond he was of her. How he liked to keep himself turned towards her and keep his arm protectively around her. She valued the steady weight of that arm so highly, and he valued having someone soft to hold. Both these things pushed back the Travelers above their heads.

Maybe that was why he had asked for her now, when he felt the weight of infinite planets pressing down on him. Hajime took in a breath and asked if her being here was about that.

_‘I’m here to turn out the lights.’_

Huh—

_‘To make you rest. You need rest, Hajime! You do!’_

Okay.

It didn’t matter.

He walked down the hall with Hitoka. The last time he checked, she was a cat lamp and he was going to die alone, and this was much better than that.

How long till I get to rest, Hitoka? Do you know?

_‘Not long.’_

Okay.

_‘Please don’t feel guilty, okay? Please.’_

Okay.

_‘I mean about the dreams you’ve had. In case you didn’t—’_

…

_‘I mean! I mean it’s a lot like what I would dream of, when we were together! If you didn’t know!’_

Oh. Hah.

They were almost at the door to the arbor gardens. He asked Hitoka if she wanted tea. No answer. The arm that held Tory lifted the latch. He walked forward first, leading her in. He walked past the door and beheld his arbor garden. 

The door opened upon a landing, from which the whole high-ceilinged, main room of the gardens was visible. The finest, tallest tree was in the center of this room: an oak already half-grown by the time it was transplanted into the shuttle. It was older now, with branches that spread over the walkways at either side of it.

The branches’ shadow just barely touched the vegetable rows growing beyond them. Iwaizumi slowly descended the long stairway and made for that comforting shelter of its shadow. Each step down that long stairway, he was a little closer to its embrace. Each step he felt a little closer to a friend. This tree stood tall for him and made air for him every day, even when he wanted to wither.

He walked to the left side of the room, to the first vegetable row past the tree. He walked into the row of plums barefoot. This soil was from before the shuttle, too. It was transplanted from Earth and still alive, like him. He nurtured it and its plants like a good friend. They nurtured him in return. They fed him and warmed him and their leaves lovingly stroked his hands. Iwaizumi collapsed in slow motion into the soil.

Drowsy but with great care, he arranged his limbs between the stems and vines, pushing minimally at the dirt that he may disturb as little as possible. He pillowed the blanket into a soft ball by his head so that his extinct friend would not lay his head upon the dirt.

_‘You always reminded me of a kitten.’_

Hajime looked up at her.

It was soothingly warm in here.

_‘Hajime, do you want me to turn out the lights?’_

In this warm air, so near the soil and surrounded by green things, he did feel better.

Yes. Thanks.

She pressed her lips to his temple, and then he to her cheek. She blushed and giggled, as she always used to. And she kissed Tory goodnight. Hajime felt overcome with such love that he shuddered from it. He fell backwards into the soil.

The scheduled timer made the lights in the garden go dim. This time he was able to rest.

-

Iwaizumi navigated past two more planets. _‘Take me to victory.’_ And he pushed past another. And another. And more. 

Iwaizumi journeyed to victory alone. He carved his way there through an endlessly regenerating barrier of monsters. Such was his past and would be his future. Today and all days.

From the flight deck or spare control panel or even a tablet in bed, he mauled them routinely, and he did not make efforts to acknowledge them anymore. They themselves had long become routine. The creatures wore his scars and minded his weapons.

He would still recognize them by their horrid movements and animal habits. He had an instinctive view of them as familiar, assuring that he was still present in the universe. And separately he viewed them as obstacles to be defeated and pulverized. Torn to a handful of pieces, sometimes. Whatever he needed that day, he would bend them into that role, and so endure. Highly bendable, flexible, unbreakable beings were they.

Some days they floated by the flight deck window peering at him for hours while he stiffly ignored them, and today was another day.

He retreated deeper into the ship and into the reprieve of an ice storm that the shuttle would soon pass through. Ice particles moving at thousands of miles an hour faster than their own speed would pulverize the creatures faster and more effectively than any of his equipment. Perhaps it would pummel them so intensely they could not regenerate. Time would tell. He reported to Frog Lieutenant Jones and proceeded calmly with his day.

At the end of the daily cycle, after he was washed and ready to close his eyes and had bid all his workplace companions goodnight, he sat next to his bed for the final goodbye: to kiss his dinosaur goodnight.

One kiss atop Tory’s soft, firm head. He held the little cloth jaw with his fingers to steady it and kissed him again on the snout, slower. As always, with love.

Tory beeped at him in thanks. Or rather, one of the tablets nearby beeped.

In sleeping shorts still, he reached for the tablet to view the cause of its annoying alarm. The horror froze every piece of him: mind, soul, fingertips.

The tablet clattered out of his hand and onto the floor. An airlock door was open to the outside.

_Oh—Chri—_

There was no change in oxygen or air pressure. There was no deafening hurricane of ice crashing in from the storm outside, or equipment or structuring being torn asunder in the new vacuum.

The door was open, and everything was _still._

The only sound was a ringing in his ears as he trembled on the floor. The navigator whimpered once as he tried to stand, full of tremors and burgeoning nausea. Out of his bedroom and down a connecting hall, there was a long row of red lights pointing him towards the safety hazard.

He ignored the lights and quietly entered an emergency response room, whose contents he only touched during maintenance checks. He came out in a thin white contagion suit worn over his sleeping shorts and zipped up to his chest. It showed his bare collar and the sheen of his sweat there. Its belt and shoulder straps held weapons he’d had nightmares of using. On one wrist was a little tablet slightly larger than a watch, which he jabbed at to turn off the hazard lights.

At his input, the bloodred splashing on the walls faded. The hall turned stark white as unending time.

There were closed doors all the way down to the end, where the hall intersected with another one to the right, making an L shape. Down that way and out of sight was the little stairway by which he had once collapsed. It was a sacred space, now breached. Opened to the hazardous outside.

Iwaizumi was filled—mind, soul fingertips—with an instinctive truth: _Today is it for me._

Someone appeared at the end of the hall.

Iwaizumi’s soul left his body.

It was not just appearing where he blinked, but walking in his space. It walked where he had walked. It touched one hand to walls he had leaned on and felt safe in. Its fingers spread to feel the smooth white paneling and violate the manmade place with its skin. When it pivoted slowly at the end of the hall, claws scraping at the wall, an open-mouthed grin of delight spread on its face.

It was standing inside his fucking ship.

Iwaizumi was flying.

He was standing still but melting away, all thoughts vaporizing to nothing. His name and his life abandoned him. His memory of all things all drained away, till he was an unthinking shell who stood empty but for functions of blood and organs. Protocol abandoned him last of all. Then he was as nothing. 

_Get up off the floor!_ Ushijima screamed at his temples.

No, Iwaizumi said simply as he stood there, and banished him with a breath. 

I want—I want to stop, he wished, in a way, without real speech or thought. He was separate from his body now. In his mind he saw himself, or a featureless man in navigator dress, collapse to the floor and break into uneven pieces. But in reality, he stood. In reality he did not fall, because there was a blood-thin layer of a man inside him yet and that man still _wanted._

I want to _stop,_ he wished again. Because I want to. Ken.

The memory stole him away. He was flying, flying to the tarmac outside his duty station, where the shuttles were. The last place he had really been a whole person.

Ken had been there manning the flight line, too, even if Iwaizumi hadn’t seen him. On the tarmac with Ken and Kuroo and Misaki and many others, he’d carried and helped people to the last. All the screaming and flailing hands. The shouting and sweating. The faces of people who needed him, branded into his soul. He flew them to safety in this very shuttle in dozens of flights. He gave and created safety for others, because he wanted to.

Years ago, he had gone on his very first spacewalk with his captain where he had floated in the emptiness and seen the infinite dark.

The infinite dark was at the end of the hall.

More of its pack were filing in behind it. The assortment of shapes and names that he had known for so long. 12, the spike-headed adolescent. 3, the one colored pink in its hair and its tail. They stood slightly hunched or crouched halfway to the floor like animals prepared to skitter across the ground. But the leader stood tall with its arms now at its sides. No being alive since Earth’s conquerors had ever stood so tall, so victorious, as Oikawa.

 _Take me to victory_ is what his dead captain often said to keep him alive, but Iwaizumi had already braced his knees to stay standing of his own volition. Because he wanted to. 

The navigator flew back home. He spoke.

“Today is it for you.”

Through all of its pursuit, it had never heard his voice. It raised its head at the sound; a quiver of humanlike ecstasy rattled it from head to toe. Iwaizumi recalled its wistful longing from his long-ago attempt to talk to it. He wondered if he was more wrong than he ever thought in believing it had feelings. If it remembered that day, or if it was even capable of it.

There came a deep humming vibration emanating from its very skin that soared down the hallway and rumbled the walls. Iwaizumi felt when it reached him like a physical touch of many probing hands. Or many vibrating voices.

He exhaled jaggedly through his nose. He reached behind himself and removed one of the weapons from its place on a strapped magnetic mount between his shoulders. It was rifle-shaped, full of electricity, modified for assaults. It meant nothing to the alien. It did not react to his clear challenge or the threatening shape of his weapon. It only saw the plain, delectable sight of its human obsession within its reach at last. It drooled. 

Iwaizumi aimed the rifle. All of them were still.

It pounced first with an echoing yell.

The hall came alive with the metallic boom of its footfalls and leaps, so loud Iwaizumi’s eyes squinted reflexively. It was on all fours, then running bipedal with a snap of its spine. Then Iwaizumi fired his weapon, releasing not bullets, but a fat metal payload which opened into a net with magnetic weights on its ends. The net burst open and it became the width of the whole corridor. The weights on it matched its environment: scraped every side of every wall and left no free space to run through or past.

It hit the creature as it ran. For a moment it kept heedlessly on, before the electric charges went off. The shock felled it from midair; it clattered to the floor.

The sparks were blindingly white, arcing off the walls and into doorways. While the leader coiled up in pain under the net, Iwaizumi shot two more charges over its head. The one with a shaved-looking skull ducked back into the hall while the turnip-headed dunce went down in sparks and choking sounds.

It left Iwaizumi with precious seconds to open a panel in the wall nearby and code a simulation he’d practiced since childhood: isolating his ship from invasive danger. Three panels opened in the hall ceiling at spaced intervals. Heavy slabs of metal then began to descend from the openings.

Mirroring rumbles were felt throughout the ship as more and more halls and pathways began to cut themselves off. But another vibration demanded attention a short distance ahead of him. The downed alien was caught in his trap, even its tail coiled and caught in the netting. It looked up at him with awe and determination. And joy. Which was irritating. 

He approached it, ducking under the first slowly descending door. Its eyes were not pupils now, but thin animal slits. Even smothered by the thick wiring and a spray of yet-unhealed scars on the skin, its form was muscular and strong; he felt a thin thread of an old dream brushing past just now. He wondered if the creature had actually guessed that truth of him, or he’d just imagined it. Surely, he imagined it all. He was the fool in trying to imprint human meaning on anything this rotten carnivorous shitbag did.

“I’m sorry for every positive thought I’ve ever had about you. You don’t deserve any of them,” he growled at it. But it smiled at hearing his voice. Like he was telling it some very thrilling news. “And you’re gonna regret coming in here.”

He returned the net rifle to its place on his back and replaced it with a weapon from the opposite shoulder. It had no reaction to this one either, only looking past it to maintain eye contact with Iwaizumi. He aimed it the long, open muzzle at the thing’s face. The hum had stopped; it was starting to lightly pant with excitement instead. It had a strong natural smile like a charismatic leader or an uncaring liar. It smiled like it was stronger than its pain.

Undaunted as always, it raised its head much as it could within the tight net. It licked deliberately at its lips. It showed Iwaizumi a view of its many fangs. 

So Iwaizumi showed his: he fired the flamethrower.

The fire burst red into the white corridor and the alien’s screams tore at his eardrums. Several of the net’s magnetic weights were torn up from the floor as it flailed in all directions. The lesser beings at the end of the hall shrieked their own alarm. Iwaizumi steadied his breath and began to back away, keeping the flame steady all the while. The lowering barricade awkwardly bumped his head as it finally came down from the ceiling, but he kept sweeping the flame left and right in a defensive wave till it was locked in place in the floor.

Seconds after, there was metallic scraping and screeches, a dozen sounds and a half dozen voices overlapping. Other members of the pack must have run forward under the other lowering barricade doors, through fire in order to get to him, bashing into the walls as they went. The other barricades hadn’t stopped them in time. At least not all of them. And now they were separated from him by three feet of metal. Iwaizumi’s palms sweat whole waterfalls underneath his gloves. 

_You have plenty of time,_ his captain soothed him, like he always did.

He thanked him for the encouragement, even though it wasn’t wholly true. There was much more isolating to be done. But the balm was felt; he’d clearly needed it.

Ushijima smiled at him, and Hitoka waved. In step, the two stood aside. Iwaizumi nodded at them both as he ran past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HQ Horror Week 2020 technically ended 45 minutes ago. But I spent all damn day putting this together (and Chapter 3, which I will finish and post in one more hour probably. Surprise. There will also be a 4th and final one. This was originally supposed to be a 10k oneshot and I need to stop lying to myself that I can do things like that.) 
> 
> I don't love this chapter's writing as much as I do Chap 1's, with its crushing and effective misery but I like it enough-ish and I hope you like it enough-ish. Please tell me in your comment if this chapter was enough-ish for you. 
> 
> **Some story/writing things, if you're interested**
> 
> \- Original draft for Chap 2 went right from Iwaizumi hiding in the engine clearing room (with zero compulsive masturbating) to 500 words of interlude/vague time passing, STRAIGHT to him hearing the alarm that a door was open and the aliens got in. Everything prior to that was added in the last two weeks before posting this. I felt that the arrival of the aliens was very much an "Act 3" of a story and I felt compelled to shove an Act 2 in there of getting more information/interaction with the aliens. Before the human/alien smut :/ 
> 
> \- I feel that there is great dissonance between Iwaizumi believing the aliens only want to consume/use him and the Seijoh clan having hmmm more positive intentions than that, though they and especially Alienkawa communicate this poorly. A little due to language/species barriers. Mostly because * I * communicate it poorly, because I, theauthor, want to have my cake and eat it too with this SEXII situation of aliens hunting and chasing Iwaizumi while he fends them off single-handed but also have my monster-adores-human shipbait nonsense. I cannot justify this oil-and-water narrative except that I wrote 20k words to marinate myself in it. Write your own indulgent apocalyptic alienhuman mating fic *throws dirt on mine* 
> 
> \- *pots n' pans go CLANG CLANG* Iwaizumi thought of naming the Seijoh aliens after mountains and during his brainstorming he was trying to name Alienkawa after the world's highest mountains
> 
> \- I kept up the writing quirk/thing of not having Iwaizumi have any spoken dialogue, on purpose, till near the end of his chapter, and his first line was the action movie hero/self-uplifting line of "Today is it for you." Whee I liked it >:) (Because the day of the navigator, the time in which they must work and endure and lead others and all humanity and themselves, is always "today") 
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> [I would love to follow other Haikyuu fans on my favorite social media website](https://stormears.tumblr.com))


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Umbreon used Double-kick! She posted two chapters within two hours! *BAM BAM* 
> 
> Consider this the ACTION chapter.

The chase went on. He would have to end it today, if he wanted to live. After gathering himself multiple times and having his pieces picked up by multiple people, Iwaizumi knew for certain that he did want to.

From the tiny tablet screen on his wrist and multiple panels on the wall, he defended his home from further invasion.

The ship ventilation system was partitioned into five self-sustaining sections. The water tankards were blocked from any toxic input. He stopped by a random tablet held by a metal arm in the ceiling. He searched its readings for infrared indicators. He must check the status of the invaders in their closed-off section of hall by that open airlock.

They were not there.

Iwaizumi scowled, angered, but it mixed poorly with the cold, tight discomfort that grew in his belly. He shunted these emotions aside and scrutinized the indicators of little sparks and fires. The fire in those sections of hall were being washed down by the automatic water system, but none of the heat signatures were the body heat of living organisms. Somehow, none of them were in that hall anymore. But he’d known that their body heat had always been intermittent. Blinking in and out, perhaps. Perhaps as they teleported within _each other’s_ peripheries. Or some other method they had known not to let him see.

Iwaizumi inhaled, exhaled, trembled. He replaced his gloves with fresh ones and kept moving.

He ran till a man-shaped yellowish blur flashed on the tablet for one second and disappeared. It had been in the central part of the arbor room, he realized with a horrified gasp.

It may have been drawn by the scent of growth, dirt or bugs. Things to eat. It may have been stepping on his tomatoes and plums and spinach even now. It may be poisoning his plants with its very skin and presence.

It may be _eating_ his plants.

Iwaizumi ground his teeth and began to sprint towards the invading demons. If they entered his domain and trampled his last piece of Earth for their own revolting ends, if they felled the oak tree, or if they walked in his garden soil—

“I’ll kill you,” Iwaizumi growled aloud, and it was true.

His solitude-driven dreams and general insanity and uncomfortable regard for the creatures were all thankfully shunted to the side by this. These motherfuckers were not permitted in his garden, stepping in soil and plants he had cultivated since the gardens were on earth. The creatures, whatever they meant in hanging off of him for so long, were no different than the monstrosities that had once brought down that Traveler over Hokkaido. The ones he had not just mauled, but murdered. Murder was no sin. Not here, not anymore. He would not regret it.

The rifle was primed. He was panting with unmatched human bloodlust. He kicked open the door to the main arbor room and paused on the main landing.

The landing looked down the long stair and pointed towards the great oak tree in the center of the room, decorated with loving grass and ferns at its roots. And it was poisoned. The creature with thick, black brows was there with both hands defiling the tree trunk. It was testing the sensation of bark on its skin. It had a tail today, an exact replica of one that Iwaizumi had wrapped wires around and torn almost completely off three months ago.

Its head whipped around when Iwaizumi entered, but its dead-eyed face did not change. Its disgraceful palms remained on his tree. Violating his territory. Waiting for him to react.

 _“Fuck you!”_ Iwaizumi shouted. He fired the rifle.

The distance was great enough that it could dodge the shot, ducking behind the tree. The net weights magnetized and sparked uselessly as the net pinned down half in the metal flooring and half in the grass at the foot of the oak. Sparks flew from it and struck the trunk. Still the creature’s body heat was nonexistent on his wrist radar—

He was tackled from behind. His feet left the landing; he sailed in an arc over the stairs, started to fall. But more than falling, more than trapped, he was _touched_.

Not in a dream or intrusive thought and not by machinery or tools but by a living thing. He was so slow to react that the creature freely wrapped him in two extra, winding limbs and he felt another reaching around him. His first real reaction was to scream. Then protocol.

Per short-term combat protocol, this suit was equipped with two knives on the shoulders. He found one easily as finding his own hand, and then tried to turn in the thing’s grip to identify it: Hanamaki. Number 3. Pink one. It had tackled him like a quarterback taking an enemy to the ground. The ground was at least two stories below from the top of the stairs. 

It had wrapped him in two arms and two tentacles. These ones were softly pink at the ends, softly tapered, one of them reaching up his chest and dangerously close to his bare skin where the zipper stopped before his collarbone. Iwaizumi’s pupils shrank to mindless dots, to see that in real life. Immediately he stabbed downward with his knife before that fucking thing could touch his skin.

They struck the stairs once, bounced up, kept falling. It hardly hurt. 

Time moved slowly for the navigator and his terror. He hurled the knife down into the pink alien’s upper back. It entered a cavity so deep that his hand disappeared inside it, till it hit some unseen beam of cartilage with branches and arms of thinner cartilage. Iwaizumi obeyed combat protocol and flexed his arm back towards himself to messily sever as much of it as he could.

His hand and his knife came out of the alien covered in minty-green blood. Pained, rolling vibrations blasted out of the beast’s very skin. Iwaizumi’s eyes rumbled in their sockets.

Finally they hit the floor and rolled. The pinktip tentacles all went slack, allowing him to slip partially out of their grip and get to his knees. Even after the hard fall, he hadn’t let go of the knife. He changed to a two-handed grip and slammed it down yet again. This time he lost the knife inside the cavity. His hands came out hot, wet, empty.

Iwaizumi tore out of its limp, poisonous grip and up onto his feet like a cat. He found the flamethrower just a few steps away, fetched it, came back. Without thought or preamble he kicked Hanamaki in his nose.

“Eat shit,” he said as he trembled. It lay prone on its back and one of its own tentacles, looking like the failed end of a barfight. Iwaizumi felt much worse. He felt death. Behind him.

He knew his combat protocol: he aimed and primed the flamethrower even before he had fully turned around. The black-browed creature snapped from a four-legged run to a bipedal jump. It had already halved the distance between him and itself. There were six tentacles sprouting from its back and shoulders and one from the thigh. More than there were on its body just one minute ago.

Iwaizumi aimed for its face. There was a ring of its reaching limbs surrounding his peripheral vision: Matsukawa trying to reach for him from all directions. Then the ring of tentacle-tips disappeared as his flames struck it in the face and chest. All its limbs flailed and some caught fire, too. 

Its scream sounded human. Like an injured man whom he must help, or touch. Iwaizumi screamed back so he would not hear it.

“Do not _ever_ touch my garden, you rotten little bitch!” Iwaizumi screeched at the ball of fire in front of him. He got closer and spread his hateful fire all over it. 

The alien had fallen and started scrambling drunkenly on the floor. It finally started scrambling uniformly backwards and then got to its feet. It went back towards the oak tree, taking fire with it. The tree was already burning after sparks from the net projectile found fuel in the bark. The wildflowers around it were burning. A burning line rose up her trunk and into her central branches. Fire flung from Number 2 was nearly licking at the lights on the ceiling. The bare white wall to his right, where Ushijima had stood and spoken to him, and the vegetable bed to his left where Hitoka had bid him to rest, were both awash with the colors of fire.

Iwaizumi’s hateful aggression flagged. The huge, gasping breaths he was taking were only just sustaining him. He stumbled away from the groaning pink alien by the stairs and closer to his beloved tree. He gasped aloud in her air, tasting smoke.

“My—friend, my friend,” he gasped to her. “I’ll put those flames out! You stay strong—”

His tree waved her branches at him and spilled her leaves onto his cheeks, both charred and living.

 _My beautiful, strong son,_ she said with her kiss.

He was too weak to weep. 

Breathing her air washed away his nightmare fear, letting other facts and facets filter into his consciousness again. Pain on his hip and left leg from his forced fall down the stairs was pulsing and demanding agony from him. He took instinctive stock of his weaponry and knew there was but one knife left and his net rifle was far away. He did not remember where Tory was.

A hand slapped onto his right hip; Iwaizumi realized almost too late it was his own. Tory was no longer tied to his belt there. At the same time, he heard more hissing voices and a series of echoing chitters and high moans like whales communing underwater. Above all, vibrations from above him. More of them were coming.

The nameless leader was on his way too, from somewhere. He hadn’t laid eyes on the silver-haired one yet, and did not care. Where was Tory?

The sprinklers turned weakly on; a heavy drop of water caught him in the eye.

Unbidden, out of nothing, Iwaizumi heard Tetsurou Kuroo speaking to him.

_S’like all intelligent life is coming to—_

A monster crushed Kuroo and his voice. It crashed onto Iwaizumi’s shoulders from the ceiling. Shock and pain and some miracle kept him standing. It had one foot on his shoulder and one on his upper back. The clawed toes gripped so tight that they tore through the thin cloth of the contamination suit, till he was feeling its skin. Till he was feeling its warm, searching tentacles along his back and his neck. Till his hearing whined into one long ring and his vision began to fail.

Iwaizumi’s sight turned to shards of broken black like Kuroo’s sweat soaked hair, covering him. The creatures were covering him: surrounding him and securing his limbs with theirs and touching him. It was the touch of death to him. It shut his mental faculties away, erased parts of his very memory, to be actually touched this way. To be actually captured this way in real, breathing life and not in a soft dream he made for himself. 

Parts of Iwaizumi Hajime were melting away under this violent fission. The _touch_ of Wakatoshi on his shoulder and _touch_ of Ken on his arms and his clothes and the _touch_ of his parents on his hair and his head were as nothing. He saw each one and forgot them. He felt each foreign limb grabbing and pulling him and knew with self-preservation-instinctive certainty that they must not have him. 

He was unmoored from himself—flying, again. To earth. To the tarmac. To the infinite dark on a spacewalk outside the shuttle, against every wall that kept him in this place. To nowhere. The creature saw his wild, rolling eyes which could not see. 

“Don’t _fucking touch me!_ ” he cried in his mind, but it never left his mouth.

With his right arm he grabbed at a limb on his left shoulder, a leg, and whirled around. He tore the ceiling-jumping creature off his body and swung it like a living club. It struck one creature, or two, he would never know or see.

While its own arms flailed, he swung it downward, hard, till his victim hit the ground and then he planted a boot on its chest. The rest of him fell forward, so that one knee hit the ground hard and the opposite arm easily planted a knife down into the thing’s chest. At last he was able to see that the one that dropped on him from the ceiling was Kunimi. Soft, slow Number 13. The one that clung to the easy protection of the spike-headed dunce. There was no protection now. 

Embers fell onto the tarmac. Iwaizumi held the little one down with one hand at its collarbone. It grabbed at his arm with two thin tentacles and one of its own hands, but he did not stop. He swung the knife down into its chest once, twice, more.

 _All intelligent life,_ Kuroo said, with his hand on Iwaizumi’s sweat-soaked face, _coming to hunt us (you) down, Iwaizumi. You._

It wasn’t supposed to go this mad. They weren’t supposed to be in his garden, taking his last piece of Earth and life. He was supposed to be on Ken’s Traveler, right now.

The little one was whining submissively at him. It cried for his mercy. He cried with it; he never wanted to hurt this one.

He cried for his life and his sacrosanct arbor room and his parents’ ashes now drifting between the stars. He cried at the sensation of being touched. He could hardly see through the veil of blood over his eyes.

He would have cried till he fell and was subdued in his tears. But movement in the periphery of his vision roused another burst of rage in him: one of the creatures was running through his vegetable rows where Hitoka had blessed him with recuperating rest.

Kunimi's begging ceased to matter. Iwaizumi stopped puncturing its torso and roared at the heedless trampling of his garden. The change was so swift that black-haired Number 2 stopped and started scrabbling in the dirt to get further away. 

A strange arm grabbed him and Iwaizumi used his free hand to crush a bone in this arm. Another one came at him from the side that was bald-faced and big-eyed like a duckling: watchful Number 7. When it knocked him over, Iwaizumi’s back struck the floor first. Then he swung his legs forward and down till the soles of his boots hit the floor. Then his torso rose up after it, so his body all but flew upward from the floor.

Kindaichi didn’t expect him to get up so quick, so daringly. Iwaizumi roared aloud and punched him in the jaw.

His roundabout kick sent Matsukawa away after it tried to reach its tentacles dangerously close to him. 

He threw a small, spare knife in the direction of the Number 7 when it tried to sneak behind its friend and it tore away as though the knife were fire. And then they all kept their distance, walking or crawling in a circle around him like stalking wolves, though they all bled.

The creatures slowed, then stood half-broken and unmoving and surrounding the navigator. He panted, like a man on fire. Little tendrils of steam rose up from his body, like a man on fire.

The creatures surrounding him suddenly all ignored him. They looked away.

Iwaizumi faltered and momentarily considered falling onto his back to quit this effort like a tiresome dream. Instead he attentively followed their shared lines of sight. Past the partially burned central tree, up the long stairs was him, the smiling leader. The navigator fought to keep standing.

The thing tore down the stairs in two long leaps and kicked off the floor at the bottom. In three more it had crossed half the arbor room. It landed on all fours within a stone’s throw of its target, then stood up like a man. It _looked_ at him like a man.

No fiberfill glass or steel structuring separating them now, no long hallway or distance. No electrified net keeping it down. Just empty air full of wandering smoke and each other’s breath. Both sides were at a pause. At the destruction of a second earth, it seemed. The garden was Iwaizumi’s tiny earth, invaded by half a dozen monsters. No escape route into open space this time, just a Traveler about to fall.

Iwaizumi did want to fall. Protocol and thought and humanity all bled out of him. If he collapsed now, he might not care.

Why did the creature care, at all? Still?

“Can you understand me? Do you even care?” he asked it, his voice sore and a little rasping. “It’s not fucking fair. Doesn’t…fucking matter. I will. Split your pretty face in half. I got that left in me.”

The creature was standing in front of him in a casual posture unbothered by his own animal rumbling. The thing he named Oikawa was an almost-man just above his own weight and height, unperturbed by violence or fire or failure. It had humanlike, circular pupils right now. It had humanlike hair, brown and fluffy, stirred by the artificial air running into the room through the vents. It was nude and had nothing between its legs. It had long toes and claws and thin green stripes on the sides of its abdomen. It wore the shuttle weaponry’s scars all over itself.

It said: _“Come here.”_

Then it waited in content stillness, while Iwaizumi shattered.

Neither mouth nor lips moved when it spoke, unlike when it made its animal sounds. It was not some electronic recording. It was not a dream. It was not a person. Iwaizumi could sift nothing from these statements, had no strength or willpower to. He understood next to nothing about Oikawa. It seemed he would die not understanding. He was just unmoored in space, alone, and starting to fade. 

There was no option left to him but to ask it, like it was a person or something.

Iwaizumi spoke back: “What. Did you say.”

One of its hands lifted up and dragged on its bicep till green-black blood pearled on the skin. It painted its hand with the fluid. As it did this, extraneous tentacles slid out from the flesh of its shoulders and back, making quiet, wet sounds as they pushed out from the flesh. They were longer than could possibly be coiled or contained within a body of its size. They waved slowly, aimlessly in the air as though it stood underwater. Against that wild backdrop it held its hand out to Iwaizumi, now wearing its own blood on the palm and knuckles.

Iwaizumi’s fears of the intelligent life circling his ship all were petrifying to certain fact. Even if it was only parroting a noise it had heard, whether it truly knew what it said or not, it was intelligent life like him, if not beyond him. If not beyond all things that he had ever seen. The more beyond him it was, the closer he was to losing this fight. 

It _spoke_ again, the demand vibrating out of it in a rumble: _“COME. HERE.”_

One of the two essential knives was still in his hand. There were a few spare weapons on the suit yet. His vision was solid, his body ready for more. He had yet to collapse. He wanted to go on, still, at least until that collapse.

He replied to the alien, “No.”

It parted its lips this time to make a serpentine hiss and briefly let slip a large, red tongue. He wondered if it understood “no.” It looked so excited, so—happy.

Iwaizumi did not blink, but the creature was gone. Transported. 

Before he breathed again, he obeyed protocol. Not a navigator’s learned on earth but his own: his own learned instincts against alien predators polished over the past five years. By that supernatural grace, he moved to the side in time to avoid three tentacles, thick as human arms, slamming down into the place he had stood. Instead of throwing him to the ground, they slammed uselessly against the floor tiles with an echoing _WHAM._

Iwaizumi did not blink again, but the creature still moved. So did he. He defended himself. Every few seconds it teleported somewhere else, attacked, feinted, tested. Every few seconds his knife bit into a tentacle and once even into the thicker flesh of its forearm, before the body instantly disappeared from around his knife. Every muscle movement and breath was made to evade its grasp first and damage it second, but his body performed these perfectly.

Every evasion and attack of this creature that he had ever done, from the control room or a tablet or from his mind resisting its persistent warfare, was to perfect this. To make it through like he always did. To always endure. He must do this to live. 

It was moving faster. Ten seconds here, one-tenth of one there. Its claws were tearing into the floor tiles as it ran, jumped, pivoted around him and even behind him. All regardless of his blinking and his field of vision. It no longer needed a recipient to perceive it in a field of vision, but could teleport where it pleased. It had learned this. Sometime outside of his notice, it had adapted. Or learned. Or trained. 

Hajime endured to survive, barely. The alien shared this survivorship mentality with him, but bore it even more ferociously. Not just surviving but growing. 

Hajime felt a brief, heart-murmur compulsion to flee: up the oak tree, out of the garden, to his bedroom, anywhere. Though he ran to and fro throughout half the room, it was to no specific point or place much less to safety. This conflict was ultimately all a circle ringing closer and closer to him. He had known for a long while that he was surrounded.

It appeared again, running at his side like a competitor in a sport. Like it meant to win a race against him at last. It did.

The creature caught him in that moment of faltering will because it had made his evasive run falter, too. One serpentine tentacle was close enough to wrap around his knee, and he had been too slow to jump away.

Two more came in the wake of the first and grabbed at his wrists. They forced his arms up and outward, breaking his defensive stance.

Iwaizumi’s teeth clacked together and he very nearly screamed through them when the creature pivoted to be directly in front of him. Its hands grabbed at his shoulders, then held his shoulders, then his free leg had no traction on the floor and he was falling backward. Bearing down like a Traveler on fire.

The creature slammed his back onto the floor with a triumphant scream. The sound of it drowned out Iwaizumi’s own. It was all the sound in the arbor room.

The sound and the impact shattered what remained of him. There were alien tentacles holding his hands down and one of his legs, the body of one hovering above, the silhouette of his favorite tree watching him. All the things he’d been carrying through this long hunt were falling out of his grip. All thoughts were leaping unbidden from him, leaving him unable to speak.

Iwaizumi started to gasp, and gasp, and gasp, and panic. His eyes compulsively squeezed shut while his last knife fell out of his fingers.

The thing he named Oikawa used one of its spare limbs to grab at the knife and fling it away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters 2 and 3 were originally one big chapter, but I decided to split part of the "Hunt Down the Iwa" segment into Chapter 3 here, as the whole product was veeery long and seemed dragged out because of it. So I'm just posting this section two damn hours after I posted Chapter 2. 
> 
> This part is only about 3800 words, so short for me. I would like to work on actually writing shorter chapters, sometimes. On purpose. As opposed to my usual 10-15k ones. So I can start spending more time overall actually POSTING the fanfics that I spend weeks or months working on and yammering about. 
> 
> **Story/writing bits, if you're interested**
> 
> \- I deliberated a lot on where to end this chapter, before I realized I was mostly looking for an excuse to include a bit of alienkawa triumphantly tasting his prize with his tongue before ending. But around that same time in the narration, the writing was looking lame, word choice was collapsing and it was really looking like I had written it at 2am and I didn't want it to look lame and half-baked. Man, when younger me who was already neck-deep into fanfiction realized MONSTERTONGUES were a thing, it was OVER. 
> 
> \- So Oikawa knows at least one phrase of human language. Gosh that is like so interesting 
> 
> \- Sorry Hanamaki and Kunimi for having Iwaizumi stab you a lot. I like you guys! And ehh you'll be all right. They/the Seijoh crew GENERALLY do not begrudge Iwaizumi his violence, as it doesn't mean that much to a species that can infinitely regenerate, and they also just think he's neat. A very interesting and badass "alien". Also if they did resent him for it, making them get over that would cause a huge story hurdle/conflict I didn't want to have to spend time smoothing over. This story has already taken a very long time to write (like all my stories...) and I didn't want to spend time on even more plot/padding/extras than I already have. 
> 
> Interspecies intercourse next time. (And interspecies communication too. And a tour of the ship. And some other things. Maybe even an ending.) 
> 
> OTHER THINGS 
> 
> [-Me crashing dissonant topics and tones like "alien in love" and "human thinks alien wants to kill them" and "misery" together like slamming my funnybone against a door](https://imgur.com/a/zJKkuap))  
> [-Shouldering the burden of my stupid tastes and nevertheless really trying to do a good job](https://imgur.com/a/Ztr01XZ))  
> [-When I feel like I did a scene or passage real good](https://imgur.com/a/BkNZoky))  
> [-Pondering my writing decisions and wondering if I'm just doin what I love or just doing shit](https://imgur.com/a/Ol6gji6))
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
